Welcome to Necaxa: Rob, Ryan and Eva bring the Wrexham playbook to Mexico

More than 5,000 miles from Wrexham's meteoric rise up the English Football League pyramid that has earned global headlines, a new Hollywood script is unfolding for the club's celebrity owners in the telenovela-like drama of Mexican fútbol.

"It is so unbelievably, incredibly exciting and passionate and very different from English football," Rob Mac, co-owner of Wrexham and now Liga MX's Necaxa, said to ESPN. "It's the same sport, but the culture is obviously so different, and the gravitas is there in both. The passion is there, but there is a sense that the differences are stark.

"English football, it feels more like a fight. A Mexican football game feels like a dance, and I knew, 'Oh wow, that feels different enough to us than Wrexham that we could tell a really beautiful story.'"

When Mac and fellow megastar Ryan Reynolds took charge of Wrexham in 2020, the duo were able to revive the historic Welsh side, and captured the club's rebirth for their "Welcome to Wrexham" docuseries. Since buying a stake in Necaxa, a Mexican club that also has a storied past that stretches back more than 100 years, in 2024, a similar story is now developing that has coincided with the release of Los Rayos' own docuseries: "Necaxa."

Starring renowned actress Eva Longoria, who invested in the team in 2021, the series highlights the cinematic highs and lows of the predictably unpredictable Liga MX. Unlike Wrexham, though, there is still plenty left to be proven on the field in Aguascalientes.

Once a powerhouse in the 1990s, and without a league trophy for almost 30 years, Necaxa have lived in the shadow of high-spending juggernauts of the modern era of Mexican soccer. Within that era, the underdogs have been consistent playoff contenders, but not title contenders. While they've developed a reputation for unearthing diamonds in the rough from the transfer market, they've also often seen those signings quickly leave for marquee roles at more prominent Mexican clubs.

Their new celebrity investors are hoping for a promising sequel of sorts after the breakthroughs of Wrexham, but first things first, how did they all find themselves in Aguascalientes?

Becoming part of the 'biggest opportunity in global sports'

"Well, I didn't know a lot about la liga mexicana," Longoria, nicknamed "La Patrona" ("The Boss") in the docuseries, told ESPN. "I am part of an investment group that invests in many sports. [NWSL's] Angel City was my first investment in football, and then I have a pickleball team and a padel team. My group came to me, and they said, 'We're thinking about investing in la liga mexicana, and they proceeded to tell me the audience numbers, the amount of fans worldwide. I was just blown away by the enormity of the league."

As the most-watched soccer league in both Mexico and the U.S., Liga MX houses massively popular clubs like Chivas and Club América that are capable of selling out any venue in either country. Arguments have been made that if there was a "big five" in North American sports, Mexico's soccer competition would have no problem entering the conversation.

Taking a chance on Liga MX, and as part of the NX Football USA LLC group that has a long list of star-studded members (Mesut Özil, Kate Upton, Odell Beckham Jr., Justin Verlander, Victor Oladipo, Bode Miller, Richard Hamilton and Shawn Marion), Longoria and her associates acquired a 50% ownership stake in Necaxa. But why specifically that team?

"Necaxa is a club that is now 102 years old, Necaxa is a club that has won championships in Liga MX, Aguascalientes is a really nice city, lot of strong international businesses there," said co-managing partner and owner, Sam Porter, to ESPN. "It felt like a great fit, and then we met with our now partners, the Tinajero family, and they were very serious people, very professional. We kind of saw each other, I think, as a really great fit. They were a fit in the sense that they are Mexicans who know the country, they know the league, they know a lot of the inner workings.

"Eva has been part of our group since day one, and you know, she also has given us a lot of insights on Mexican culture and different thoughts there. We all just agreed this was a really nice club, great history, great city."

Just as importantly, both Longoria and Porter believe that Liga MX is an undervalued league. Porter himself stated that when making the acquisition, he felt that the Mexican top flight was "probably the least explored, biggest opportunity in global sports" for investors when considering viewership and fandom on both sides of the border. With the aim of success for Necaxa and potential global interest, they strived to transform the club into a prominent team.

But financial investment isn't always a guarantee of immediate sporting glory, or box office acclaim.

Between 2021 and 2023, Necaxa qualified for the playoffs twice, but were immediately knocked out in the preliminary play-in round on both occasions. Even when the club did defy expectations, off the field, the conversations in media sometimes didn't go as hoped.

"They're so talented and they deserve way more attention than they're getting," Longoria said. "Even when we win a game against Club América or Cruz Azul, the headline is 'Cruz Azul lost,' right? Like it doesn't say 'Necaxa won.' The way people speak about us, changing the image of what they think Necaxa is and putting a spotlight on the talent that we have, our amazing players."

One way to gain more of the spotlight? Why not enlist some help from Wrexham's Mac and Reynolds, who joined the team's ownership group last year in an effort to begin a fresh and glamorous chapter for the Mexican side that would also be given the Tinseltown treatment.

Welcome to Necaxa, Rob and Ryan

"Necaxa has obviously not won the league in a very, very, very long time," Mac said. "As a sports fan, and as a human being, we love to watch people fight through adversity when the deck is stacked against them and they can still get up off the mat and keep continuing to fight. That was what was most exciting to me about Necaxa."

With Wrexham's accomplishments under their belts, the game plan of Mac and Reynolds has so far been similar in their early days in Mexico: Ask plenty of questions, set an ambitious tone and culture, but crucially, leave the sporting decisions to the experts.

"The worst thing that you could possibly do, and we were so aware of this with Wrexham, and exceptionally so with Necaxa, the worst thing you can do is walk into a situation and say, 'OK, I know what I'm doing now, everybody follow my lead,'" Mac said. "It's actually a great benefit of Ryan and I knowing nothing about football, and I know Eva is a fan of football, but she knew that she didn't know anything about the running of a business of football.

"That allows us to stay out of all football operations. So that gives us actually an incredible amount of freedom to let people run football the way that they know how to run football, and we just do what we know how to do, which is tell stories about it."

For Porter, the addition of Mac and Reynolds, and the subsequent TV series, is seen as the possible last piece of the puzzle for the team that has all of the right bones in its infrastructure. When the co-managing partner was asked about his overall assessment of Necaxa, he highlighted a good balance of training, player assessment, facilities, a track record of identifying undervalued talent, and a great history.

"We felt like the biggest missing space or opportunity was a lot of what you're seeing come to fruition with the show, which is shining a light on Necaxa outside of folks who are already aware of Liga MX or from Aguascalientes," Porter said.

In turn, this may not only raise the profile of the club and its community, but also give key players added incentive to stick around instead of looking to join flashier clubs in Liga MX.

"I think the fans have this misconception. [They] think that teams go, 'Hey, I'm selling the player and I'm putting the money in my pocket.' It's really not how it goes," Porter said. "When it comes to selling players, quite frankly, it's like [U.S. international Alejandro] Zendejas to América. We did not want to sell Zendejas, we wanted to keep him. We wanted him to be our key midfielder for the next five-plus seasons. We loved the kid, but he's like, 'Hey, it's Mexico City, it's the biggest club in the league. I want to go here.'

"It's always a challenge for us to keep them. That happens every semester for a club like ours, we're trying to get to a place where we buy those players and they stay with us. There's been a bunch of players at Wrexham who have become famous and written books and they've done and had commercial opportunities that they would have never had. We think these things do give you a chance to grow the club in a meaningful way. That's our hope."

'More than a business opportunity'

Looking back onto the pitch, the telenovela-like drama that Mac described as making him "instantly hooked" will be sure to provide plenty of dips and turns in Necaxa's future.

Despite an impressive fifth-place finish in last spring's regular season, which led to a spot in the quarterfinal round of the playoffs, Necaxa have had a rocky Apertura run with a 1W-2D-3L record and a group-stage exit from Leagues Cup (a joint MLS-Liga MX tournament). Capable of earning stalemates against giants like Club América or Lionel Messi's Inter Miami in one week, but then conceding five goals the next, consistency has yet to be harnessed.

Could Necaxa gain some help with a surprise guest through a Wrexham player addition, or vice-versa? Although those in charge noted it would need to be the right player at the right moment, there is a sense that it's only a matter of time before it happens.

At the overarching league level, there's also plot twists in store.

While there's intriguing developments such as an expected league-wide TV rights deal in 2028 -- Porter stated that Liga MX is "the biggest football league in the world that does not have a centralized media rights [deal]" -- there's also uncertainties when you consider the structure of the competition that may reintroduce promotion/relegation after it was initially paused in 2020.

"It's a double-edged sword," Mac said of promotion/relegation, which provided an avenue for Wrexham to move up the English football pyramid, but also comes with the risk of being demoted if a season goes wrong enough. "As a fan, as a supporter and as a storyteller, it's much more exciting and much more fun. But as anybody who's paying attention realizes, the reason it doesn't exist in the vast amount of professional sports specifically in the United States, is because of the potential value and devaluation of the clubs. So what it does is it creates stakes, but it also creates terror amongst ownership."

Terror, passion, excitement -- what else do you need from a Hollywood production?

Regardless of what develops on the script, for Longoria, what matters in the end is the additional meaning that Necaxa has to her thanks to her roots as a Mexican-American from Texas.

Longoria, who didn't grow up speaking Spanish, now lives in Mexico City with the purpose of learning about her culture alongside Mexican husband José Bastón and bilingual son Santiago. As she rediscovers what it means for her to be Latina while self-identifying as Mexican, Mexican-American and "gringa," she insists the commitment to Necaxa is about culture. Longoria always set her sights on creating a docuseries about Necaxa in a bid to introduce her club to the world, and now, she could do so while uplifting Mexican voices in a moment she feels is most necessary.

"Anytime I have an opportunity to put a positive image of Mexicans on the screen -- small screen, big screen -- I take it because I think we're in a moment where we need to remind people of the positive things that come out of Mexico and of our community," she said. "And so for me, more than a business opportunity, I knew I wanted to tell their stories. And I always knew I was gonna do a docuseries when I first invested in the team."

Mac felt similarly.

"What we try to do with Wrexham and what we're trying to do with Necaxa is to suggest to the audience, 'These people might sound different than you, they might look different than you, they might be from a different culture, they might be from a different continent, but they love all of the same things as you,'" he said.

Given some time, Mac may even begin to sound like an Aguascalientes resident.

It's a work in progress, but more than 5,000 miles from his Welsh-speaking endeavors with Wrexham, he's trying his hand at improving his Spanish. When asked unprompted at the end of the interview if he spoke the language, Mac provided a surprisingly fluent response for more than a minute.

"Si, hablo español un poco," the Necaxa co-owner said. "Entonces es muy importante."