Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney understood the assignment. After their takeover of AFC Wrexham had been completed in February 2021 the Hollywood actors made a pledge: to return the club to the English Football League. First mission accomplished.
After 15 long years marooned in the National League, a period that included a handful of promotion bids, one or two relegation scraps but mostly mind-numbing, soul-crushing, mediocrity, Wrexham are now back where they feel they belong.
Relegation in 2008 ended 87 consecutive years in the top four divisions. It has been a long journey back.
League Two may not represent the pinnacle for a club of Wrexham’s renewed sense of ambition, but it is certainly a sizable step in the right direction.
Just three years ago, they were in danger of plummeting into the sixth-tier; on Saturday, they start their League Two campaign against MK Dons.
And their supporters can’t wait for it all to begin.
“It’s absolutely incredible and what we’ve wanted for many, many years,” Kerry Evans, Wrexham’s disability liaison officer, tells i.
“The excitement of Saturday, getting back into the Football League is huge.
“I’m a massive supporter of when we were fan-owned, but to be honest, this potentially was never, ever going to be a realisation without our new owners being involved. It’s a very exciting time indeed.”
Nathan Salt, a journalist and co-host of the Rob, Ryan, Red podcast adds: “The new wave of fans – 16, 17, 18-year-olds – can’t remember the club being in the EFL.
“So to be back in and moving in the right direction given we’ve been out for so long is massively important. I know it’s a cliché to stay, but Wrexham is the heartbeat of the city.”
“It just means so much to everybody, it’s massive for the town to get back into the league,” says Michael “Scoot” Hett, the lead singer of The Declan Swans whose track Always Sunny In Wrexham has become an unofficial club anthem.
“[It’s] simple things like the League Cup, just even being back in that we are so looking forward to it because we’ve not been in it for 15 years. For the owners to come in and within two seasons to get us back into the league has been brilliant.”
Ordinarily when a team earns promotion to a higher division the first objective is survival. But such is the weight of expectation surrounding Wrexham that anything other than a promotion challenge would be a disappointment.
The bookmakers have them installed as the favourites to not only go up but to do as champions. Since 2000, only two clubs have won the League Two title the season after being promoted from the National League: Doncaster Rovers in 2003-04 and Carlisle United in 2005-06.
“I think we’re the easiest team the bookies’ could have put because we got a record points total in the National League and essentially have the equivalent of a League One squad,” Salt says. “So on that basis the favourites tag makes sense but I think fans realistically are looking at top seven.”
“I would like to think that we’d be in a play-off position, I think we’re very capable of that,” adds Evans. “Personally, I don’t think we need to run these leagues too fast. We’ve been a long time getting to this situation.”
Wrexham were expected to go up last season after outspending their divisional opponents on talent predominantly sourced from higher leagues, an approach that has inevitably attracted scorn from rival clubs. If their rapid rise is typical of modern football, little else about their story is conventional.
Welcome To Wrexham, the Disney-commissioned documentary series, has launched the club into the stratosphere, making actual celebrities of locals like Evans and Hett. It was such a hit that a second season is due for release next month.
The revitalised Racecourse Ground, previously neglected by unscrupulous owners with bad intentions, now regularly hosts Holywood A-listers. McElhenney will be in attendance and there are whispers that Hugh Jackman may join him.
And such is their burgeoning popularity in North America, the club’s pre-season tour to North Carolina, Los Angeles and Philadelphia barely caused a ripple. This is not the norm for most EFL clubs. The German town of Barkinhausen was the most exotic location that Saturday’s opponents MK Dons played in this summer.
“If we win the first couple of games then people will say ‘wow, the US tour was amazing’ and if we lose a couple people will say ‘we should never have gone’,” Salt says.
“I think we’re looking fine but you just never know until somebody gets absolutely clattered inside two minutes against MK Dons when we’ll be a long way from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and back down to earth.”
The tour was a success from a brand-building perspective but it was overshadowed by a serious injury to star striker Paul Mullin during a 3-1 win over Manchester United’s U21s.
Mullin, the scorer of 64 goals in 84 games for Wrexham in the National League, was given oxygen after suffering a punctured lung following a collision with Nathan Bishop. A seething Phil Parkinson warned Bishop to “stay away from Wrexham” after the game.
The 28-year-old Mullin is currently recuperating in LA at McElhenney’s house.
So. Excited.
— Rob McElhenney (@RMcElhenney) August 1, 2023pic.twitter.com/NENrkXtkVo
“Losing Paul Mullin is like smashing your favourite glassware, there’s no real way of replacing him,” Salt adds. “We’ve never had so many punctured lung experts as long as I’ve been following the club.
“He is bordering on legendary status already which sounds ridiculous when he’s only been a non-league footballer for Wrexham but his cult hero status is completely secure. Fans are now going out into town to get tattoos of him.
“He just embodies what people want in their team. Obviously, people love goalscorers and he’s scored a hell of a lot of goals, but it’s also his effort levels and how he just gets what it means to be in communities like Wrexham.”
It has also been a surprisingly subdued summer on the transfer front with only one signing so far, central defender Will Boyle from Huddersfield. Ben Foster, the veteran goalkeeper has also agreed to stay on for another year after playing a key role in last season’s run-in.
Besides Mullin, the topic of “international members” has become a talking point ahead of the new campaign.
Wrexham reserve 75 tickets each home game for club members based overseas, a policy that has attracted criticism given demand is outstripping supply locally.
“I have absolutely zero issue with that,” Salt says. “It’s quite amazing; I’ve never known so many people to care about Wrexham who aren’t Wrexham fans. They like to tell us what we should be angry at.
“International fans have transformed the football club. Without them, our revenues are completely different. And what is 75 tickets in a 10,000 attendance? Nothing really.”
Hett agrees, saying that the move is helping to “sell Wrexham all over the world”.
And he would know. The Declan Swans have earned a legion of loyal fans around the globe since being featured in the first series of Welcome To Wrexham. So much so that Hett and his bandmates Mark and Ben Jones performed at McElhenney’s Philadelphia pub Mac’s Tavern during Wrexham’s stateside tour.
“It’s been absolutely unbelievable,” Hett says. “The big one for us was when Ryan Reynolds shared our Always Sunny song on his TikTok, it just went mad. We had maybe a few thousand views to then you’re talking 16 million.”
Another pinch yourself moment occurred last summer when The Declan Swans opened for Kings Of Leon at the Racecourse.
“I was never a good footballer at school. If somebody said to me ‘you’re going to play at the Racecourse’, I would have said ‘nah, no way’ but we played. Alright in a different capacity as a band rather than playing football but we had two full houses and it was an absolutely brilliant experience.”
The same has been true for Evans, who describes the club as “unrecognisable” from the one she joined nearly seven years ago when she relied on fan donations and fundraisers to assist the club’s disabled fans, rather than the backing of the club’s custodians.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m going to Aldi to do my shopping on a Sunday morning or I’m in London for the weekend or on a cruise ship on holiday, everywhere I go people come up to me,” she says.
“Everybody asks me for pictures and I find it very humbling to be honest because I’m just little old Kerry doing a job that I absolutely love.”
The Rob, Ryan, Red podcast that Salt co-hosts with another sports journalist, Rich Fay, has also skyrocketed in popularity in line with the club’s own ascent.
“We had a three episode rule where we said if nobody listens to it in three episodes then we’ll knock it on the head. But we’re still here now 129 episodes later,” Salt says.
“The amount of messages I get every day from people all over the world whether it’s Japan or New York or LA or wherever, I’ve never known Wrexham to be so popular.”
For most of this century, Wrexham have been a club either in sharp decline or gripped by stagnation. Now they are only heading in an upwards trajectory, attracting more followers as they go.
The Racecourse is now a “bucket list” destination for those eager to peek behind the Disney curtain; the city has become a tourist destination, boosting the local economy.
There is still a sense of surrealism that this has all happened to their club. But for now, supporters are happy to just enjoy the ride.
“Going back years you’d always see in Wrexham, like in any town, kids wearing Man United, Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea shirts, but all the kids now wear Wrexham tops,” says Hett. “Everybody wants to be a part of it.”
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