You’ll know when Wrexham football club is finally standing on two feet again, so the dark joke goes: all of the stands at the Racecourse will have people in them.
The Kop, deemed unsafe in 2008, was once the largest all-standing terrace in the Football League. It is now a skeleton, overrun by ivy on one side and surrounded by a chipboard blockade, its primal roar nothing but a distant memory.
Before the Kop, the old Mold Road stand stood empty for almost 15 years until redevelopment in 1999. It was a memorial running the entire length of the pitch, a relic of what had gone before.
That chipboard, although necessary as building work begins, is a cause of great aesthetic regret. Football grounds have a way of revealing themselves like village pubs on a cold night. This one is ruined a little, a walk over the railway bridge to meet grey, damp wood. At least you’ll never miss the floodlights, often referred to locally as the biggest in the world. The current building work is to make them even taller.
The Racecourse deserves better. As much as Bramall Lane in Sheffield or Brazil’s Maracana, this is one of football’s birthplaces. It is the cradle of the international game.
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That history is not exactly shouted from the rooftops. Were this the US, there would be billboards and flashing signs indicating that you are stepping ever closer towards football history as you pass Majestic Wine and a Premier Inn.
Wrexham’s County Borough Museum has a temporary football kit exhibition – like finding water in the desert when discovered accidentally – but it hardly makes a song and dance of the Racecourse’s place in time. At the stadium, the same. It is as if Wrexham is waiting until its football club is finally back in the present it desires before they dare talk up the past once more.
Wrexham did not have a monopoly on resentment and regret. They were not the only club to lose their way and their supporters were not the only ones who believed that they were shafted by those who had a duty to protect what they owned. But that is no mitigation against the heartbreak; anguish shared is not anguish halved. Wrexham was a proud town that clung to its football club and its club was broken into pieces.
The sorrow began in 2002, when Pryce Griffiths, a long-term, local and popular owner, sold his majority share to Mark Guterman, former chairman of Wrexham’s biggest rivals Chester City, although it later transpired that Guterman – who had taken Chester into administration – was partnering with property developer Alex Hamilton.
In June 2002, ownership of the Racecourse was transferred to CrucialMove, owned by Hamilton. Subsequently he also bought out the club’s lease to play in the stadium.
By 2004, Hamilton had taken over as chairman and owned 78 per cent of the club. A property developer did what a property developer does: Hamilton announced plans for redevelopment and, in September 2004, gave Wrexham notice to leave the ground. There was a point when liquidation, the ultimate end, seemed like the only realistic one.
If a club can ever be saved by going into administration, Wrexham were. After a tax bill of £800,000 provoked a winding-up order, administrators were called in in December 2004. Those administrators challenged the initial ground deals and sued CrucialMove, alleging that Guterman had breached his duty to act in the club’s interests and Hamilton should have been aware of that breach. They won and then won again in the court of appeal.
But Wrexham had been gutted. In 2008, they were relegated out of the Football League after an 87-year stay. The new consortium owners, initially led by Neville Dickens but then sold to Geoff Moss, vowed to clear debts and renovate the ground by purchasing land around the stadium to build student flats, but the renovation never happened and Wrexham were still losing – and owing – money when the Supporters’ Trust were finally able to complete purchase of the club in 2011. If we learn nothing else from this tale, it is that Supporters’ Trusts and organisations are British football’s most valuable asset.
The Trust ensured that the club survived (and that security was never overlooked by supporters, given the history), but between 2013 and 2018 Wrexham failed to even make the top six in the National League.
The area waited for a miracle, a local businessman made good or a EuroMillions winner, perhaps. Honourable, rich potential owners do not grow on trees and there is far more demand than supply.
There’s no way of saying this to make it sound more normal than aliens landing on the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct: two Hollywood actors, who had never met before, decided to buy a non-league club in a town that neither of them had ever been to.
Rob McElhenney had seen British writer Humphrey Ker watching football on a tablet during breaks on Mythic Quest and became fascinated. Ryan Reynolds wanted in too. Amongst all the hoopla, the celebrities and the Disney+ series, a simple message (as explained by Ker): “It was purely a desire to find a place that wore its heart on its sleeve as a football town and that needed a bit of a helping hand. Because that’s what we felt like we could give.”
This isn’t unique to them, but it’s still eternally true: Wrexham needs its football club. This city (a town until last year) has suffered two periods of intense decline, one long slow economic death and one quick.
North Wales – with Wrexham its biggest conurbation – was a hotspot of Industrial Revolution manufacture and traditional industry: coal, steel, brickworks, brewing, iron, leather. At its peak, there were 38 collieries in the area. When these industries went into terminal decline in the 1970s and 1980s, Wrexham suffered uncontrollably and those who wanted to leave were forced into the trap of negative equity.
The Wrexham Industrial Estate offered respite, currently providing 7,000 jobs, but Covid-19, following Brexit, was a punch that Wrexham didn’t need. Since 2010, the local borough has suffered an average cut to welfare spending per working age adult of over £700 a year.
Latest department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data indicates that 6,434 children aged under 16 are living in families with designated low incomes in Wrexham – almost 25 per cent of the child population.
“The takeover has totally breathed new life into a town that was starting to lose its identity,” says Nathan Salt, a sports journalist and co-host of the RobRyanRed Wrexham podcast. “A huge economic downturn, a change in the colour of the political seat and a football club that was channelling towards the bottom half of the league saw motivation wane for many.
“What Rob and Ryan have been able to do not just for the football club but for the entire community is make people have that feeling of hope again, hope that better things are on the horizon. Now kids in the area want a Wrexham shirt, rather than a Liverpool or Everton one.”
The image of Wrexham city centre is projected across the United Kingdom. On High Street, there are vape shops and bars but precious little else. On Hope Street alone, 12 different shop fronts are closed or closing – the irony doesn’t escape that soon there will be no Hope Street. The Butcher’s Market, which opened in 1848, has never been so quiet. Covid-19 forced many into early retirement or to seek alternative work.
One unit that does remain for now, before temporarily moving to Queen Square, is Mad4Movies, owned by Rob Clarke. Clarke’s father worked for Wrexham and he has been a supporter all of his life. He reminds me – half-smiling, half-ruefully – that we meet 31 years to the day since the famous FA Cup victory over Arsenal. His enthusiasm for his club is obvious from his first word; so too is his understandably bitterness at the rot that was allowed to set in before 2021.
“I can’t pretend it’s not a bit weird,” Clarke says. “Not in a negative way, but certainly weird. This is Wrexham – we’re not used to things like this happening and that disbelief takes a while to get over.
“There’s also the sense that we can’t actually be proud of anything until we get back into the Football League. Being outside of it is a stain on this club.”
Reynolds and McElhenney’s shrewdest move was to anticipate that cynicism and disbelief. In Wrexham, and at Wrexham football club, people are forgiven for inspecting the gift horse’s teeth and if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Was this a PR stunt? Were Wrexham being used? Would the owners get bored after six months, abandoning a community asset like an unwanted Christmas gift?
They went into the Turf Hotel on the corner of the Kop to make friends with the landlord, Wayne Jones. They went into Mad4Movies and met Clarke, a visit that required Covid-19 tests and handlers but ended with the trio talking about trash movies more than football.
They invested in the women’s team and formed the first powerchair football club in Wales. They made a point of including the Welsh language in promotional videos. They made donations to food banks and charitable donations to individuals, including to help a fan who required a specially-adapted bathroom in a new home.
Of course the new owners increased the club’s social media followings and signed sponsorship deals with TikTok – why wouldn’t you? Of course they have invested significantly in the playing squad where possible, because the aim is to get this club back into the Football League and every supporter is on board with that. But they have kept the community at the heart of the club. And when you do that in places like Wrexham, the community loves you back.
“I know it’s a cliche, but it’s true: what has happened to Wrexham has put a smile on the face of the community,” says Clarke. “You can see the lift it has given people every day.” That’s all the more true given the Covid-19 nightmare, when first there was no football and then no football fans. Their return in August 2021, now to watch a team under new ownership, with a new manager and with new players, was a period of reflection and remembrance, but hope and ambition too. This season, Wrexham’s average home attendance in the fifth tier is greater than two clubs in Serie A.
There is a video you can watch in the museum called “The Wrexham Way”, filmed a year or two before the takeover. Towards the end, one supporter has evidently been asked what the club means to him; he’s a little taken aback because the answer is obvious: “It’s just a real club, isn’t it? Real football, real people.” None of that has been lost. That is a greater achievement than many will realise.
There will always be challenges. The National League, with its pitiful one automatic promotion place, is one of the hardest leagues in world football to escape and this season Wrexham and Notts County are likely to fight until the end.
Wrexham still post financial losses, covered by the owners. I arrived desperate to avoid the “Always Sunny In…” pun but, as I walked away from the Racecourse, rain arrived on a crisp, cold January afternoon and a perfect double rainbow appeared, squeezing in the corners of the ground in its arc. Life in the lower leagues is difficult, whoever’s name is on the door; there will be sunshine and rain.
We should end where we started. Last June, Wrexham completed the purchase of the Racecourse Ground from Glyndwr University – buying rather than selling assets is a welcome new era. Planning permission was granted in November to construct a new 5,500 capacity stand to replace the Kop.
It is desperately sad that years of neglect and decay will lead to enforced demolition, but perhaps the ghosts will go with it. That is the plan: the Racecourse will rise again, hosting league football and the Wales national team. And all four sides will be full.
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