LOS ANGELES — When "Welcome to Wrexham," the Emmy-winning FX docuseries, kicks off its third season Thursday (streaming the next day on Hulu), our intrepid heroes are preparing for their first season in the fourth tier of English soccer after 15 years in the semipro National League.

Funding the team's rise, and saving the down-on-its-luck Welsh city where the club plays, was the whole point of the series when actors Rob McElhenney ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") and Ryan Reynolds ("Deadpool") came up with the idea of buying Wrexham AFC during the pandemic.

So when the club, the third-oldest professional team in the world, was promoted last April — and, spoiler alert, was promoted again this month to the third-tier League One — shouldn't that have been a wrap? Wasn't that the time to roll credits?

Not necessarily. Because now the goal has changed.

"That's the beauty of sport. You just don't know where it's going to end," said McElhenney, a hardcore fan of Philadelphia's professional sports teams. "Our ultimate goal is to build a sustainable model that will allow us to not only get to the Premier League, but sustain in the Premier League and eventually win the Premier League and be in the Champions League."

To put that in perspective, in U.S. sports that would be like taking a rookie-league baseball team and turning it into the New York Yankees — if baseball had promotion and relegation, which it does not. So there really is no comparison.

But since McElhenney and Reynolds come from a world of make believe, where nothing is impossible, why not dream big? Well, for one thing this isn't a Hollywood script in which the guy gets the girl and evil never wins. There's no guarantee "Welcome to Wrexham" will have a happy ending.

But it wouldn't be wise to bet against that.

"That's part of the gambit here. You're surrendering to fate," Reynolds said. "You can't write the script in advance. You can only work as hard as humanly possible to put the best club and infrastructure out on the onto that pitch and that's what makes it compelling. That we don't have that kind of control.

"And in football, not unlike life, anything can happen."

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