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Tom Hamilton, Senior Writer
WREXHAM, Wales — The football club started and continues at The Turf. It is where Wrexham was formed back in 1864, and where locals found solace with one another when tragedy hit the area in 1934. It’s where they met through the dark times when they feared their club would fall into oblivion. Now it’s synonymous with the club’s journey since McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds took charge in 2021.
It’s late on Friday evening, and The Turf is ready for the match against Crawley the following afternoon. Three of the many tourists from the U.S. have sampled Wrexham Lager and Rob McElhenney’s Four Wall whiskey at the pub hugging Wrexham’s ground before snaking back to their hotel. The visitors from Lesotho, as part of the football club’s partnership with charity Kick4Life, have come and gone, complete with a TV crew. And the locals left are reflecting on life before and after Hollywood came to town.
The pub regulars aren’t surprised by much in 2024. They’ve welcomed Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Prince William and Wrexham’s owners — along with cameras, tourists and fans of the show “Welcome to Wrexham” on pilgrimage into north Wales — into their second home over the years, but the rules of eight-ball on The Turf’s pool table stay the same: winner stays on. The décor has changed — there’s now a wooden carving of Deadpool — but it’s still a Wrexham haven, one that goes a long way to immortalize the club’s heroes of yesteryear.
Some visitors are shocked it exists, thinking Wayne Jones’ pub was a set. The locals are always there, nursing various drinks day after day, and there’s still a tiny faction who use scepticism about the future as self-preservation.
“We’ve always had hope,” said John, a lifelong fan. “But hope has a habit of kicking you. Rob and Ryan have changed our town, and football club. We’d have been f—ed without them. But also, the thing is, when you’ve had your heart broken, it’s easy to break it again.”
The previous Monday, Wrexham lost 3-1 at Birmingham in front of a crowd of 27,980 that included Tom Brady, David Beckham and McElhenney. Birmingham were the bigger fish, with a budget far larger than that of any team in the division. (Promotion to the Championship is Birmingham’s top priority this season, backed by approximately $40 million in summer transfer spending.)
Five days later, Crawley were at Wrexham. On this occasion, Wrexham had the stronger budget and the better players; as the hosts battled to a 2-1 win, the packed STōK Cae Ras stands sang songs of yesteryear alongside new chants honouring players like James McClean and Elliot Lee.
It was a week that showed both the local and international side of Wrexham, and all the while, those in charge of the club, and the lifelong supporters are wondering what this club’s ceiling is.
Next season, if promoted from League One, Wrexham could be just one step from the Premier League, just five years after they could’ve been relegated to the sixth tier of English football. It’s a remarkable turnaround, but with that comes unchartered challenges. There’s no guidebook on how to manage such a trajectory.
“Ultimately what we’ve been able to marry here is celebrity and stardom with a community football club,” Wrexham director Shaun Harvey told ESPN. “We’ve been able to use one for the benefit of the other in a way nobody else has ever been able to marry.”
Somewhere between those two poles is where Wrexham find themselves in 2024, but for all the success and lofty ambition, their momentum buoyed by consecutive promotions, there are plenty of cautionary tales of teams that have flown too close to the sun and been torched. The owners know it, too.
“I think complacency is so dangerous,” executive director Humphrey Ker told ESPN. “A belief we know everything or we know better or any of those sorts of things are dangerous. You need to constantly be checking your work, making sure you cross the T’s and dot the I’s. You can’t do boom and bust. We see that a lot in football. It’s very dangerous when you gamble.”
“Everything going on in the community always links back to the club and vice versa”
When the Wrexham Supporters’ Trust — the body that owned the club before the takeover — heard about Reynolds and McElhenney’s interest back in 2020, they were unsure what to make of it.
“I’m fairly certain most Wrexham fans would agree with this purely because as a fan base and as a community, we’ve been robbed by charlatans in the past,” said Wayne Jones, the owner of The Turf. “We’ve had some shady owners who have done nothing but take without giving anything back. So of course, when you hear their names, your first question is, why do they want to invest in a team from Northeast Wales that has fallen on hard times?
“When I first heard Ryan Reynolds’ name, I fell off my chair laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced if it was going to be anybody [taking over the club], it’d be a local millionaire builder developer or something. I started to get a little bit giddy, a little bit excited. I started to allow myself to believe. I mean, of course, there was scepticism, but any fears have been quickly pushed aside.”
The rise since those early days of new ownership has been rapid. Wrexham fell short in the 2021-22 National League playoffs, but were promoted to League Two in 2022-23, and again last season to go up again. Manager Phil Parkinson has seen it all.
“Phil’s been our most important signing,” said Richie McNeil, the son of Wrexham legend and club president Dixie McNeil.
“He’s been fantastic because he’s embraced everything going on around the club but has managed to stay focused on actually the bit making a difference,” Harvey said.
It’s the day before the Crawley match, and Parkinson requests we change the location for our interview: He wants to talk at the Wrexham Miners Project, a wonderful self-funded community hub and museum highlighting the history of mining in the area. The Sunday after the match marks the 90th anniversary of the 1934 Gresford Colliery Disaster, where 262 miners and four rescuers lost their lives when an explosion entombed them all half a mile below ground at 2:08 a.m. on Sept. 22.
Many of them were Wrexham fans and had changed their shifts so they could attend Wrexham vs. Tranmere that afternoon. Only 11 bodies were recovered following one of the worst disasters in British mining history.
Remarkably, the Wrexham match went ahead as planned later that day. Geoff Charles, a reporter from the Wrexham Star, went from the Colliery — where he determined the true number of miners who’d perished by counting the absent miners’ lamps — to cover the game. “There are three things Wrexham are famous for really. The Gresford Colliery Disaster, the Caia Park riots, and the football club,” said Tom, a trustee at the miners’ project.
Parkinson learned about the disaster when he joined Wrexham, and it has since become a story he ensures all players hear, showing the team a video before the Crawley match. The players wore black shirts with the number 90 embroidered on the front, alongside a miner’s lamp.
“When you join the youth team, you’re made aware of [it], but growing up around here, you know how much it means to the town and how much of an impact it had at the time. This weekend means a lot to the people of Wrexham,” academy product Max Cleworth said.
“The club’s always been at the centre of the community. Everything going on in the community always links back to the club and vice versa. I think it plays a massive part in the way people go into their week.”
Parkinson is more than a manager to this team. Not only does he organize the squad, but he plays a big part in nurturing the relationship between club and community while handling the attention, pressure and focus that comes with the celebrity owners and their documentary. There’s also the expectation the club will continue winning.
“I think in the last few years it’s showed a successful football team can lift a community,” Parkinson said. “The football club is at the heart of Wrexham, and our success in recent years has lifted everybody and it’s been great to see. It’s very important all the players and everybody understands the area we are representing, the town, and the history, not just of the football club but the area as well.”
The area is still going through a rough time. Figures in January 2024 showed one in four children in Wrexham are living in poverty, and as you head away from the ground into town, you’ll see buildings pockmarked with boarded-up shops. The further away you get, the quieter it gets, but locals like Steve “Tappy” Tapp, who owns “Wrexham Trainer Revival,” have seen signs of regeneration.
“A successful football club breeds a successful town,” he said. “I’m 100 percent sure of it and we’re not seeing it yet, but in the next three, four, maybe five years, you’ll see it.”
Tapp’s business used to be a market stall, but the interest in his trainer restoration business, his bespoke clothing range focused on footwear and in Wrexham saw him expand into a shop on Lord Street. Three weeks after opening his new shop in October 2023, it was burgled with £8,000 worth of stock stolen. Tapp hadn’t had time to finalise insurance, leaving him broke. He was going to shut up shop, but a couple of visitors from the U.S. who had gotten to know Tapp set up a GoFundMe page to help him get back on his feet. McElhenney and Reynolds (who were not available to comment for this story) helped donations reach £7,000 to get his business back up and running.
Tapp met McElhenney on one of his visits to Wrexham. McElhenney was putting together plans to turn a patch of land in the town centre into the Ryan Rodney Reynolds Memorial Park — a community space, under the banner “Parks and Wrex.”
“I said I’m the guy who you donated to when my shop was burgled,” Tapp said. “We gave each other a hug and it was a lovely little moment.”
About a six-minute walk away from Tapp’s business is Vault 33, a new bar part-owned by Neil Roberts. He won four caps for Wales, had two spells at the club, and after a post-playing career that involved heading up youth recruitment for Manchester City (he helped sign Brahim Díaz, Jadon Sancho and Eric García) and then sporting director at Swansea, he’s found himself back home.
“In all honesty, I wouldn’t be sat here in my bar if it wasn’t for the investment and involvement of Rob and Ryan in the football club because the place was sort of on its knees and it was going the wrong way as opposed to the right way,” Roberts said. “And we have not only benefited from a football standpoint, but we’ve seen the economy slowly start to get back on its feet. There’s been a real sort of feeling of hope and optimism about what else is to come in the future.”
Back at The Turf, and after a steady day of “Welcome to Wrexham” pilgrims stopping by, there are locals at the bar on Thursday night happy to tell the story of Rob and Ryan (their surnames aren’t needed here). There’s the story of Aidan Stott, a fan with cerebral palsy, who was trying to raise money to install an adapted bath in his flat. McElhenney heard about it and donated the full £6,000. Former player Martyn Chalk suffered severe injuries in a road accident in Thailand; the co-chairmen helped pay for his treatment.
There are other examples, like the £10,000 they contributed to James Jones’ fundraising efforts for Wrexham Maelor and Bolton hospitals and the charity Spoons, who helped his family when his son Jude was born 16 weeks premature. And there’s the £26,200 they’re each sponsoring Ker on his mission to raise £250,000 for the Wrexham Miners Project. Some of these feature in the documentary, others don’t.
There are other stories about the celebrity visits. They reserve an area of the snug for celebrities when they visit The Turf, but few make it that far. Blake Lively arrived, paid for a pint of Guinness, and went into the back room to join supporters in singing Wrexham songs.
Before the Crawley match, folks were queuing for two hours before The Turf opened at 11 a.m.: locals, Americans, Australians, Canadians and a couple of Germans. Some locals grumble about the pub getting too busy on matchday, disrupting their decades-old routine. Ady Morrison, whose grandfather was one of the 266 who died at Gresford, rides his scooter around on matchdays dressed as Deadpool, waving at local kids and tourists.
Over at the ground a couple of hours before kick-off, a hundred or so tourists and young kids were waiting for the players to arrive. One fan from China was there to hand to Paul Mullin a pendant she made with his name on it, along with a present for his son, Albi. She also asked him to sign her photos of “Welshpool” (a cameo role Mullin played in the latest “Deadpool & Wolverine” movie) and was keen to ask the striker whether he’d ever consider playing for Wales. Wrex, the mascot, poses for photos.
“The locals are not stupid,” Wayne Jones said. “They’re aware the tourists are improving things for local people. So of course they’re going to welcome them. We’re four years in, so we’re a little bit more used to it than we were at the very beginning. In the beginning, it was unprecedented, not for the football club, but for the little pub next door and everybody in the town. Everybody found it a little bit sort of surreal.
“I mean, listen: Six months before the takeover, it was pretty grim. I think every Wrexham fan would agree. We were in a place where economically the town was struggling a little bit, and the club was too. But these guys have come in and breathed fresh air into the entire region. It was completely night and day. They’ve put their money where their mouth is, but there’s nothing else in this town which brings together several thousand people together than the club. Nothing at all. So the football is the life and death of the entire town.”
1:49
Why Wrexham are ‘no longer big fish in small pond’ alongside Birmingham in League One
Humphrey Ker and Shaun Harvey describe how Wrexham are relishing competition with Tom Brady’s Birmingham in League One.
The locals have also enjoyed their own celebrity status. On Wrexham’s two preseason tours of the U.S., they brought along a few familiar faces from the documentary. Jones was one — a queue of a hundred deep were hoping for a selfie with him — as were others like local band the Declan Swans. Their song “It’s Always Sunny in Wrexham” is played before Wrexham’s home matches and has become the club’s anthem under the owners. The band’s profile has rocketed; thanks to the show, they got to open for the Kings of Leon and Stereophonics when those bands passed through on tour.
Michael Hett, better known as “Scoot” and the band’s lead singer, is also a trustee of the WMP.
“Without the owners, this place wouldn’t have survived,” he said. “They’ve changed my life, but also the lives of so many others who didn’t have a great deal.” At every home match, The Declan Swans’ anthem rings out at the stadium, with the chorus telling the story of life before and after “Rob and Ryan.”
“Less than a mile from the centre of town. A famous old stadium crumbling down. No one’s invested so much as a penny. Bring on the Deadpool and Rob McElhеnney.”
“The magic of the story is the momentum”
Back in June, after Wrexham’s promotion to League One was confirmed, the executives had a meeting. Ker said they should approach this next stage as part of a marathon. McElhenney was a bit more excited, looking for reasons why they couldn’t get promoted again.
When you talk to lifelong fans about what they feel will happen to their club over the next five years, the answers differ, but there’s one familiar thread: They hope the owners will be sticking around. They still have deep-seated fears from poor owners in the past that the dream will end, and they’ll fall back into a struggle for existence. Memories of where the club was before the 2019-20 season was halted due to COVID-19 are still vivid. Supporters felt they were destined for relegation then, and once in National League North, they feared for the club’s existence.
“You’d see attendances fall because people don’t want to watch part-time football, so we were in a dark place before the takeover, but you fast-forward a year or so, and it’s like somebody turned the light switch on,” Jones said.
With that fresh in the mind, some feel it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a season of consolidation in League One.
“I would love us to win the title,” Ker said. “I would love us to get promoted. I would love all those things, but I wouldn’t be too sad if, at the end of this year, our principal achievements on the dockets were more on the side of improving our infrastructure.”
The season started well, with Wrexham undefeated after five matches. After their defeat to Birmingham (a team in which Brady is a minority owner), Parkinson said it would be “madness” for Wrexham to try to compete with a club like that in the transfer market. Birmingham spent nearly £30m on players in the offseason, including a £15m deal for Fulham striker Jay Stansfield, roughly triple the previous League One-record fee. Wrexham’s club-record transfer fee is under £500,000 (spent this summer). Sources put Wrexham’s wage budget in the top six or so in League One, but well behind that of Birmingham.
“I don’t know if it’s a nice place to be, but we’re certainly getting a little bit of his old medicine, aren’t we?” Harvey said. “In reality, we spent more than anybody else in the National League, and we spent more than anybody else in League Two. So you’re certainly not going to hear me complaining somebody’s spending more money than us in League One because that’d be hypocritical at best.”
They’ve also had to be clever in the transfer market; despite the cachet and resources of celebrity owners, there’s little in the way of reckless spending.
“I think people often overestimated how much money we had and how much money we were able to throw around,” Ker said. “Sustainability is so important for us to find a way to get to a point whereby this town, this team sustains itself long after Rob and Ryan are gone.
“You can think, if we spend an extra £10m, we’re guaranteed to go up. But if it doesn’t happen, you’ve got to find a way to replace that £10m. And slowly but surely that becomes a very dangerous cycle.”
When it comes to looking at a new player, Wrexham identify talent through data and analytics, but also Parkinson’s eye. Harvey then does the negotiating.
“The talks are to the point, and there’s no bulls—“, said one agent. He said he also has to handle the “Wrexham tax,” with rival clubs putting a premium on asking prices when the Welsh side comes calling.
“Ultimately, football’s been full of clubs perceived to be there to be taken advantage of,” Harvey said. “We have an approach where we determine what we believe the value of a player is to this club, and if we can get a deal done, that’s what we’ll do. If it comes to more, then we don’t. And if it comes to less, we think we’ve won. So ultimately you have to be true to your values.”
The owners also take a keen interest and are willing to call any potential player if it helps sway their decision. But it’s Parkinson who has the final call, and he does his due diligence. As McElhenney said in a recent podcast: “[Parkinson] has a rule, which is no a–holes, no p—-s, and … more specifically, I’m going to use another word: no d—heads.”
“We always make calls to a lot of people, and I’ll always have a meeting with the player to know the person we sign. I think character is key because the lads are representing a great club but also a club with a huge profile now,” Parkinson said. “So it’s important we bring the right people in who are going to conduct themselves properly, not get too carried away with the profile of the club and keep the feet firmly on the ground.”
They prioritised younger players this summer, with an eye on the future, but the club’s collective focus goes beyond bolstering the player squad. They don’t own a training ground; they train predominantly at the local national football development centre. The academy is a work in progress as they look to develop more home-grown first-team players like Cleworth. The young central defender came through the academy and is first-choice on the right of their back three, having forced his way into the team amid all the new arrivals.
“I’ve spent pretty much half my life at this club, which is a bit mad to say,” he said. “I remember joining like it was yesterday. It’s been very quick, and the last few years have been a bit of a whirlwind.”
Other areas of Wrexham’s operations are on the to-do list, like expanding the tiny club shop. They’ve introduced a new CEO (Michael Williamson) and are increasing their focus on community projects, like introducing street football schemes in the harder-to-reach areas of Wrexham under newly appointed lead Jamie Edwards.
“We’ve got to have a program tying the football club to the community more tightly than it ever has been before,” Ker said.
They’re also investing in the women’s team, with the goal of making them one of the best teams in the world, according to McElhenney.
Then there’s the ground. The old fourth wall of the Kop stood derelict from 2008 through to being bulldozed in January 2023. They have erected a temporary stand in its place, and for every home match, the tourists and locals are welcomed to the “oldest international football ground in the world still in use,” having hosted Wales-Scotland in 1877. But they’re making a six-figure loss on that temporary stand. Plans are ongoing to build a permanent structure there.
“We’ve [been] breaking longstanding attendance records for this club virtually every week. Eventually, we can’t because we’ve only got so many seats in here,” Ker said. “But when it is a 5,500-seat stand, it allows us to live and sustain at a higher level. From talking to Rob and Ryan, they don’t want to end there. They want to do other stands and do other bits and pieces, but that’s all a long way off. We need to think in terms of where are we in 10 years rather than where are we in May.”
It feels like the club is stuck in this Sisyphean task of modernising its home to maximise what’s possible, while playing catch-up with its increasing demand and growth.
“It’s been an ordeal since the day we started,” Harvey said. “In truth, we’ve been chasing his tail since then, trying to keep up with everything. But the magic of the story is the momentum.”
Their owners are still aiming big, and unapologetically so.
“We say this all the time, but we want to be in the Premier League, as crazy as that sounds to some people,” Reynolds told ESPN in 2023. “If it is theoretically possible to go from the fifth tier in professional football to the Premier League, why wouldn’t we do that? Why wouldn’t we use our last drop of blood to get there? We’re in it for the ride. This is a multi-decade project.”
Parkinson is unwilling to make any bold predictions on where they’ll end up this season.
“The expectancy of winning games I’ve dealt with before because I’ve managed other clubs with equal expectancy,” he said. “But I think the profile of the club — and not just in the U.S., but in other parts of the world as well — has been something completely different. I think we’ve got to keep our feet on the floor. People have been asking about the league table and I’ve probably got drawn into talking about it since we went top, but we’ve got work to do.”
It begs the question, though, of what Wrexham’s realistic limits are.
“What’s the ceiling for this club? In truth, I don’t think it’s got one,” Harvey said. “And the reason I don’t think it’s got one is nobody has tried to attack the funding and the business of a football club with the same model as what we’re using here. This has been organic.
“We made mistakes because there was no specific script we were working on. We knew what we wanted to achieve, but had no idea ultimately how we were going to get there.”
If promoted to the Championship, Wrexham would be shoulder-to-shoulder with clubs relegated from the Premier League paying up to £100,000 a week in wages (the average wage in the Championship is around £12,000 per week, while in League One it is around £2,500). They’d be up against clubs backed by vast multibillion-pound companies that squeeze by the constraints of Financial Fair Play every year.
“Clubs are losing money hand over fist in the Championship,” said football finance expert Kieran Maguire. “Wrexham would be in for a shock in the Championship. Remember, a couple of seasons ago they were the big fish in the National League. They’d need incredible support from their owners, and it would be down to how much money the owners would be willing to put in where there are no guarantees over returns.”
Wrexham’s last accounts from the 2022-23 season saw the club owe their owners £9m, and this tension does play on their minds if they continue moving up the ladder. But amid all the change, some traditions remain sacrosanct. After Wrexham’s win over Crawley, down the road at the Wrexham Miners’ Project, they were preparing to light 266 candles. The ceremony started at 6 p.m., with the flames extinguished at 2:08 a.m. the following morning, on Sept. 22, when the first explosion happened 90 years ago.
Back at The Turf an hour or two after the victory, tourists are still reliving their Wrexham experience with one another, posting memories to Instagram and taking final photos of the bar. The locals are nursing their pints, still drenched from the rain, talking about what’s needed to shore up their midfield against Leyton Orient on Saturday. The win keeps them at the top of the league for another week at least, and with that success, comes the constant re-appraisal of what’s possible and what needs to be done to make this club Championship-ready.
“Wrexham felt like a sleeping giant,” said Ker. “The giant’s rolled over; it hasn’t necessarily got out of bed yet, but it’s tossing and turning.”
“I think we’d need a little bit of a change in the structure of the football club,” Ker said if Wrexham were promoted to the top tier. “You would need — and I can’t think of a less gross word — a sugar daddy of some kind. You’d need someone who is like, ‘Look, I’m going to invest in this because I want to be part of this.’ And once you get there, who knows?”