Five. One.

Not a Hollywood ending, that. More like one of those indie films where nothing good happens and everyone just stares out of windows for two hours.

Wrexham got absolutely taken apart by Southampton at the weekend. Ripped to shreds. Five goals conceded. Dumped out of the playoff places. And somewhere in Los Angeles, I imagine Ryan Reynolds is staring at his phone wondering whether the Championship was supposed to be this unpleasant.

In my day, getting stuffed 5-1 at home was a private humiliation. You'd trudge off, the local paper would give you a kicking on Monday, and you'd get on with it. Nobody was filming a documentary about it. Nobody was cutting it into a three-part episode arc with a sad piano soundtrack and a voiceover about "the journey."

Don't get me started.

Look, I've got nothing against Reynolds and Rob McElhenney personally. They seem like decent blokes. They've put money in, they've invested in the ground, the town loves them. Fair play. But somewhere along the line, this whole thing stopped being about Wrexham Football Club and started being about Wrexham: The Brand. Wrexham: The Experience. Wrexham: Available Now On Your Preferred Streaming Platform.

And the problem with turning your football club into a television show is that the Championship doesn't care about your narrative arc. The Championship is a relentless, brutal, soul-destroying slog that eats dreams for breakfast and washes them down with a lukewarm cup of Bovril. It doesn't care that you've got celebrity owners. It doesn't care that you've got three million subscribers on YouTube. It cares about whether your centre-halves can defend set pieces. And on the evidence of Saturday, Wrexham's can't.

That's the problem with modern football. Everyone wants the story. Nobody wants the grind.

I managed in the lower leagues for twenty years. Twenty years of motorway service stations and physio rooms that smelled like a wet dog. You know what kept clubs alive back then? Not content strategies. Not brand partnerships. Results. Three points on a Tuesday night in Hartlepool. A clean sheet at Rochdale when your goalkeeper had the flu. That was the currency. Not clicks.

Southampton, meanwhile, look like they know exactly what the Championship demands. They've been there. They've done the hard yards. They put five past Wrexham with the cold efficiency of a team that understands this league will punish you the second you stop concentrating. There's no glamour in what Southampton are doing. Nobody's making a Netflix series about Russell Martin's tactics board. But they're winning football matches, which is sort of the point of the whole exercise.

Wrexham are now outside the top six with the business end of the season approaching. That's a genuine crisis, not a cliffhanger. Real fans, real people in that town, are watching their team slide at the worst possible moment. And I wonder sometimes whether all the noise around the club, all the cameras and the celebrity visits and the merchandise deals, actually helps when you're trying to grind out results under pressure. Or whether it just adds another layer of expectation that young players don't need.

I've seen it before. Clubs that get too big for their boots, too distracted by off-pitch nonsense, and forget that football is won on grass, not on social media.

In my day, if a Hollywood actor turned up at your training ground, you'd assume he was lost. Now he owns the place, and everyone acts like that's completely normal.

It isn't normal. And neither is getting battered 5-1 at home when you're supposedly chasing promotion.

Someone at Wrexham needs to turn the cameras off for a week. Close the doors. Get the players on that training pitch and remind them that football existed before content. Before algorithms. Before bloody streaming services.

Win a football match. Then worry about the edit.