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 (who were not available to comment for this story) 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.)
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.
“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?”
