Without prelude, Eva Longoria suddenly popped up in the second episode of this springs fourth season of FXs Welcome to Wrexham, cheering alongside Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny (now Rob Mac) in the crowd at the Racecourse.

Well explain later, onscreen text informed viewers. No explanation was actually given at the time. Necaxa The Bottom Line Enjoyable, but cant reproduce its predecessors formula. Airdate: 9 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 7 (FXX)

Cast: Eva Longoria, Ryan Reynolds, Rob Mac

But elucidation arrives on FXX (and Hulu) this week in the form of Necaxa, a spinoff or companion series from many of the same producers, focusing on Longoria and her role with Club Necaxa, a once storied, now struggling team in Mexicos Liga MX. The Famous People Buy Struggling Soccer Team genre had only one entry as recently as May, and it was a good one. Welcome to Wrexham, which made my Top 10 list for last year, has become one of my favorite pieces of comfort food, a funny and inspiring sports series that makes me laugh and cry in equal measure.

Now, in a 10-day window Im going to repeat that: 10 DAYS weve added three new shows that, without hesitation, acknowledge the potency of the Welcome to Wrexham brand. While Necaxa (pronounced nih-cox-uh) is the only direct offshoot, Amazons Built in Birmingham (about Tom Brady and Birmingham City) and ESPNs Running with the Wolves (Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos and Campobasso FC) both find ways to acknowledge Mac and Reynolds sooner than later.

Its not a fruitful comparison for these series to be stuck making. Welcome to Wrexham is a series that does five or six difficult things extremely well. The three successors, at least so far, do maybe one or two things well apiece. Necaxa adds to the necessity of the comparison by trying with limited success to reproduce large swaths of the sui generis formula. There are fresh aspects to the series, which tells its story largely in Spanish, through its first five episodes, but you know the drill.

Longoria, raised by her father to be a Cowboys fan in a different sort of football, married Jos Bastn in Mexico in 2016. Theyve lived, with their son, between Spain and Mexico for several years.

Club Necaxa was founded in 1923 and originally played in Mexico City. The team has won three league championships, but none recently. Hoping to restore Necaxa to its former glory, several groups of international investors have bought into the franchise, one of which features Eva Longoria.

If this is a genre that television intends to oversaturate us with, I have what I think is a reasonable request: Im gonna need transparency on two key points.

First, I need to understand exactly the degree of ownership stake the focal celebrity has. If everybody can be called an owner or co-owner of a professional sports team, regardless of financial commitment, the terminology loses all meaning.

In the case of Mac and Reynolds, its easy. They purchased Wrexham FC in its entirety, and while theyve diversified the ownership group around them, theyve remained the primary owners.

The newer celebrity owners exist in a fuzzier space. According to the New York Times, while Brady is part of a minority ownership group on Birmingham City, he owns roughly 3.3 percent of the club. Consuelos and Ripa are also part of a minority ownership group on Campobasso FX, and the specific logistics around that group, which you can read about, are far more complicated than the show has any interest in trying to explain, which is strange.

As for Necaxa, Longoria is also part of a minority ownership group and, to the series credit, it refers to her primarily as an investor (Welcome to Wrexham called her a co-owner). But shes just one celebrity within that group and no mention is given, for example, to Justin Verlander and Kate Upton, Necaxa investors as well.

That brings me to my more urgent level of mandatory disclosure. It needs to be said what actual, tangible power these celebrity owners have within the team.

Again, Mac and Reynolds may have hired people increasingly more people with each step up the English professional ladder to operate the team, but they have full control. Brady has none in Birmingham and admits hes basically there to offer sage and inspiring advice that nobody on the team would ever think of, like how practice is important and whatnot. I dont know what authority Consuelos actually has with Campobasso, but darned if Running with the Wolves doesnt give the impression that hes pulling the strings, even if Im guessing he is not.

And Longoria definitely has no power at Necaxa, but the show cant quite decide if that matters. Which finally leads me into my explanation of why the series, which wants to follow the Welcome to Wrexham blueprint, is so far failing, albeit entertainingly.

The smartest thing Welcome to Wrexham did was make its first season 18 episodes of roughly a half-hour apiece. That allowed the producers to find the shows voice and find its stories in easily digestible bites. Theres a tight focus to most of the early installments, as the producers and editors fiddled around with what was and wasnt working. Subsequent seasons have taken advantage of that knowledge by weaving together those effective facets as longer (most over 40 minutes now) episodes.

A great Welcome to Wrexham episode pulls together disparate elements: Theres an overall theme, a community story, a team-based story, a Mac/Reynolds story and then a climactic game that ties everything together. It works because the first season found what worked and the foundation has paid off.

Necaxa elects, instead, to skip the proving ground and leap straight into a comparable tapestry. It is ambitious but frustrating, because without a solid foundation, none of those echoed elements from Wrexham fully work.

The biggest problem is Longoria, or not Longoria, but how Necaxa tries to integrate her. If youve watched her CNN travel shows, you know shes a thoroughly charming guide, and youve probably heard her stories about her father wanting sons and her upbringing speaking only English and her determination to properly learn Spanish around the time of her marriage.

The idea that investing in the team has helped Longoria get back in touch with her cultural roots and the way this connects to her new lifestyle in Mexico is a potent one, but nobody associated with the team quite knows how to respond to her, nor she to them.

Is she meant to be a mascot? An enthusiastic maternal figure? When she gets put on a Zoom with a new coach or a director of sporting operations, is it a general courtesy? A requirement tied to her investment stake? A contrivance exclusively for the television project? What Longoria lacks is agency with or for Necaxa, meaning that she has no ability to push the primary narrative along.

Perhaps sensing that Longoria is an insufficiently load-bearing celebrity, the producers opt to shoehorn Reynolds and Mac into the story. Now, to be clear, Reynolds and Mac do have their own ownership stake in Necaxa (and, reciprocally, the Necaxa ownership group has a small stake in Wrexham). Its one that is probably larger than Longorias holdings, but the show either cant or doesnt want to explain that deal. So starting in the second episode, the pair pop up in exposition-heavy talking head segments that give the impression of having been filmed as pickups over a single crowded afternoon in a wholly anonymous hotel or conference room. Mac makes the effort to speak Spanish. Reynolds does not. Its awkward and they dont know anything about the specifics at Necaxa, so they add nothing other than their own presence.

Necaxa cant quite figure out how to land the community aspect either. Aguascalientes, which embraced the squad after its move out of Mexico City in 2003, is described as a deeply religious little town. But the narrative is tentative on how much it actually wants to accentuate the importance of religion in Aguascalientes, which anybody with eyes will be able to identify as a reasonably large city and not a little town.

The decisions on which community members to feature are faulty as well. The story of a longtime burrito vendor supporting his family by peddling his wares on game days is solid. The story of a randomly snobby kid who calls himself an anti-fan, goes to one game and then calls himself a fan is unremarkable. The story of a young vlogger on the autism spectrum feels like a somewhat craven attempt to mimic one of the best arcs from Welcome to Wrexham, ignoring how magically that series connected the profile of Millie Tipping to a storyline involving Paul Mullins son and then tied those things to the action in a single, emotional game.

And as for the soccer action? Well, it could be better. Theres nothing the producers can do about how well Los Rayos performed after Longorias arrival, though the series utilizes a lot of the same formal techniques as Welcome to Wrexham in capturing whats happening on the field. The players who receive profile treatment are generally likable if inconsistently central to that action. Where the show struggles is in constructing drama around the strange dual-tournament structure employed by Liga MX. Its badly explained, confusingly utilized and works actively against the development of traditional TV season momentum.

Im sure my reaction to Necaxa, as well as to Built in Birmingham and Running with the Wolves, is governed by an unavoidable desire to compare the offspring to their progenitor. Welcome to Wrexham is a wonderful show and I wouldnt necessarily compare every unscripted show about soccer to what it has accomplished, just as I wouldnt necessarily compare every cop show to The Wire. But I probably would compare any cop show that references The Wire to The Wire.

While Necaxa is initially clunky in all of the ways its forerunner was initially smooth, parts of Longorias story are heartwarming, parts of the teams story are inspiring and the whole thing is packaged in a polished way that reflects the creative and technical advances that the genre has made in the decades since HBO first launched Hard Knocks. Its far from a bad show. Its just a disappointing Welcome to Wrexham follow-up, at least so far.