This Guy Is the Best Thing About 'Welcome to Wrexham'

My first meaningful memory of Humphrey Ker was when he starred in the surprisingly solid, cancelled-too-soon sitcom American Auto, where he played a very tall, endearingly inept executive at a car company. (He also had a few early-episode appearances on Mythic Quest.) From what I can tell, his main qualifications for becoming the executive director of Wrexham A.F.C. were: being a massive soccer fan, having experience playing bumbling corporate types, and being married to the co-creator of Mythic Quest.

Before that, his résumé was almost entirely acting and comedy. He was part of a sketch comedy troupe and a regular on British panel shows. Aside from introducing Rob McElhenney to English football and devising the selection process that led McElhenney to choose Wrexham, I still don’t quite understand how he ended up running a football club.

And yet, here we are. He’s held the job for four years, even while occasionally continuing to act. In the early days, he had a bigger behind-the-scenes role—managing logistics and operations—but across all four seasons of the series, he’s mostly functioned as a charmingly sweaty liaison between the club and its celebrity owners, McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds. He’s basically human flop sweat, and honestly, my favorite presence on the show. He’s also weirdly compelling proof that being an obsessive fan who knows everything about the sport might actually be enough to help run a club. I kind of love him for that.

This season, he’s back in the role of the beleaguered comic foil. At one point, he jokingly volunteered to run a marathon to raise \$250,000 for the Wrexham Miners Project, a charitable arm of the club. Rob and Ryan promptly decided to take him up on it, pledging around \$52,000 between them—but only if Ker actually runs the marathon.

The joy, so far, has been watching just how miserable he is training for it—because this man has absolutely no business running a marathon. I suspect this storyline will span the whole season, given that it’s also been the main focus of his Instagram account for months now.

And what a joy that’s been. He hates it, and I love that he hates it. His deep resentment for the whole endeavor somehow makes it even more delightful—and probably more effective at fundraising. Because make no mistake: Humphrey Ker isn’t doing this out of some deep love for distance running. He’s doing it because his friends roped him into it (and, to her credit, his wife Megan Ganz is running alongside him).

It’s great television—on a series that, even setting aside the celebrity owners and the club’s underdog rise, has consistently delivered funny, heartfelt, and occasionally devastating stories about the players, the fans, and the Wrexham community. Rob and Ryan may be the draw, but Welcome to Wrexham is much bigger than they are. And Humphrey Ker brings exactly what he brings to everything he’s in: comic relief. He’s like a character from The Office—if characters from The Office were also competent. And maybe he’s a little inspiration, too, for anyone who’s ever believed that loving your team deeply and knowing your stuff could actually be enough to actually manage a sports team.

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