• Player Rating: 5.0
• Stream: Hulu
• Running Time: 10 episodes, 44 to 48 minutes each
• Audience: Ages 13 and Older
Welcome to Wrexham didn't just document the story of the rise of a small football club in a hard-luck town, it used a charm offensive to get viewers in the Untied States to care about the team, the fans, and sport of soccer. Necaxa sets out to do the same, but it's hard to care about a historic if underperforming club that competes in a top-flight league without relegation, and that doesn't really have the support of the city that it calls home — Club Necaxa moved to Aguascalientes in 2003 from Mexico City, and it has yet to connect with its community.
Our guide is the likable Eva Longoria, who grew up in Texas following the Dallas Cowboys in with her father and is now a minority owner of the club. But she doesn't have the self-deprecating humor of Rob McElhenny and Ryan Reynolds, which makes following her while she tries to protect her investment a lot less fun.
We're left with a series that uses the 2024 Leagues Cup as a dramatic arc: Does anybody in Aguascalientes still talk about Necaxa's group stage win over Seattle Sounders followed by the knockout round loss to San Jose Earthquakes? If they don't care, it's hard to see why we should.
Bienvenidos a Necaxa
Welcome to Wrexham casts a long shadow over Necaxa. It's the same formula, the same graphics, the same desire to both document the drama of breathing life into a stalled football club and getting the United States audience to care about a team and a city that most had never heard of over before ads for the series took over their streaming feed.
But Wrexham had three advantages over Necaxa. One, the town passionately loved their historic if troubled team. Two, the portrait of a coal-mining town desperately seeking a second act resonated in an America where that's a familiar story. And three, the English Football League has promotion and relegation: The stakes were real.
Necaxa, on the other hand, has yet to capture the passions of Aguascalientes, a city of 800,000 and the capital of the state of the same name. Necaxa was founded in 1923 in Mexico City by William Frasser, a Scotsman who owned the electric company in the state of Puebla – hence Necaxa's nickname, Los Rayos, or The Lightning – and it fought for attention in a city that also featured Club América, Cruz Azul, and Pumas UNAM. Crucially, Necaxa never owned its own stadium in Mexico City, and after several years of poor performances and iffy finances, the team relocated 300 miles north to Aguascalientes in 2003.
Now it calls the 23,000-seat Estadio Victoria home, an MLS-sized stadium that opened when the team arrived. After some ups and downs, Necaxa established itself in the top-tier Liga MX when promotion and relegation were frozen in 2020, ostensibly for a five-year period, but that looks increasingly permanent.
Necaxa? More like Meh-caxa
To recap: Necaxa is about a century-old club with only 22 years of roots in its community, that plays a new-ish if not particularly large stadium located in a pleasant mid-sized city, and competes in a league with no danger of relegation.
It all feels kinda meh, as the kids say. It doesn't help that the team's talisman is defender Alexis Peña, a good, not great player who, early on, suffers an ankle injury that requires surgery. Where the first season of Wrexham gave us poorly-paid players moonlighting as housepainters as they desperately tried to secure financial stability for their families, Necaxa gives us a low-key professional worth $1.8 million who has only played top-flight soccer, and who now needs to undergo a carefully-calibrated rehab.
A docuseries can only be as interesting as its subjects, and unfortunately the players, coaches, and personnel in the Necaxa universe just aren't that interesting. At least that's the case for Episodes 1 and 2 — the 10-episode series will broadcast new installments on Wednesdays on FXX and will stream on Hulu on Thursdays, and new storylines and characters will surely emerge. But you only have one chance to make a first impression, and these opening episodes are so light on substance that they leave you wondering why they bothered to make a series about this club.
Oliver Strand
More infomercial than docuseries
But the answer to that question should be obvious to anybody who pays attention to the ownership structure of Necaxa and Wrexham AFC. Longoria has a stake in NX Football USA LLC, a group that invested in Necaxa in 2021. Some of the investors in Necaxa bought a stake in Wrexham, and Wrexham owners McElhenny and Reynolds bought a stake in Necaxa.
In other words, they all have skin in the game: McElhenny and Reynolds have a financial interest in the success of Necaxa, which is why they produced this docuseries. And why they tried to squeeze something out of the footage captured last year, even if it's just not that interesting.
Maybe that's why Longoria opens the series by making a direct appeal to the viewer. The Desperate Housewives star tells us that she grew up following the Dallas Cowboys with her dad and fell in love with the sport. "I want you to fall in love with Necaxa in the same way that my father made me fall in love with the Dallas Cowboys," she says. It's a non-sequitur: She loved watching the Super Bowl-era Cowboys with her dad, so we should love watching Leagues Cup-era Necaxa at home? It doesn't track. That's because it's really a sales pitch. She has invested money in a sports team, and that team will be worth more if it has more fans.
If Wrexham was like watching McElhenny and Reynolds lovingly and obsessively restore a vintage Triumph they found sitting under two inches of dust in an old barn, Necaxa is like watching Longoria buy a Ford Explorer off the lease and ask her mechanic to see if he can get more out of it. There's a story, but there's no drama, at least not one that's worth watching.
