It was someone in the row behind me at Wrexham on Saturday afternoon who captured the extraordinary journey that those of us who support the club through the decades have experienced, these past few seasons. ‘Two years ago, we were playing Dorking Wanderers,’ he said. ‘Now it’s Bolton Wanderers.’
It was no exaggeration. And when you delve back into memories of our bleak afternoons playing Chorley, Eastleigh and Ebbsfleet during 15 long years in the non-league, it sounds perverse to hope that the club actually don’t win a third successive promotion and make the unprecedented leap from National League to Championship inside three years this spring. I don’t think I’m the only one feeling a sense of unease about that, though. In the cold light of day, I don’t want it to happen.
When Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney pleaded with fans last week to buy more replica shirts because running the club is like ‘lighting money on fire’, my instinctive reaction was: ‘Stop paying a fortune to buy promotion, then.’
Jay Rodriguez, signed from Burnley in January, is on £15,000 a week at the age of 35. Sam Smith arrived from Reading, aged 26, on around £12,000 a week with a £2million fee. Wrexham’s squad is littered with aged, big-name players, bought on big wages for the short term to take Wrexham up a level. James McClean, 35, currently warms the bench. Steven Fletcher, 37, never plays 90 minutes. Given the age of those hired guns, bought for promotion, it will be a clear-out this summer, with another new bunch arriving. Less a football team than an assorted collection of players. It doesn’t feel healthy.
If Wrexham’s were an organic kind of progress, then the players who have given so much to the extraordinary recent years would gradually step aside gracefully, allowing others to take over. Instead, players we’ve loved, like Paul Mullin and Ollie Palmer, find themselves discarded from the club’s squads amid the rush for another promotion. Elliot Lee, a wonderfully technical player, is the latest to drift to the margins.
The big January spend hasn’t helped much, yet. Rodriguez has barely delivered and ahead of last night’s promotion clash at Huddersfield was yet to score. Smith has been so-so: one goal in six. He missed a sitter against Bolton that would have been meat and drink to Palmer. The game finished goalless.
Ryan Reynolds (right) and Rob McElhenney’s blockbuster purchase of Wrexham has been a massive success on the pitch
But in the hunt for yet another promotion after reaching League One last season (pictured), Wrexham do not look like a Championship team
Expensive promotion purchases like veterans Steven Fletcher (left) and James McClean are not long-term solutions
All who knew Wrexham’s terribly dark days under the rogue ownership of Alex Hamilton, and the struggle to make ends after the Supporters’ Trust rescued the club from that penury, will tell you that Reynolds and McElhenney have been a godsend. Intelligent, imaginative, committed people who’ve transformed the club. When I was researching the book I’ve written about Wrexham’s Hollywood era, called ‘Tinseltown’, I found a place and a population with a spring suddenly put back in their step.
But it’s hard to dispel a snaking suspicion that the breakneck pursuit of Championship football is, to some extent, driven by their ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ documentary. While the Championship secures more documentary seasons, it’s hard to see a year’s consolidation in League One providing quite the same streaming gold.
A look around the club’s infrastructure tells you that there are so many more important ways to spend cash than on Jay Rodriguez’s wages. Wrexham don’t have a training ground. They still only have a temporary stand in place of the old Kop, so the Racecourse will be three-sided when work on a permanent Kop starts.
The club shop resembles a store cupboard, compared with some sides Wrexham would profess to be streets ahead of, like Carlisle or Southend. The press facilities are spartan and limited. The fan food is basic. The football journey may have been incredible, but at ground level, little has changed in the five years since McElhenney and Reynolds bought Wrexham.
Some would argue: ‘Get promoted again. Figure the rest out later.’ Yet the lower reaches of the Championship are littered with clubs, like Portsmouth, Plymouth and Derby, who have made that same leap and struggled. When a descent follows a rise, the momentum can be hard to halt, if the club’s core isn’t strong. Yeovil went up to the Championship and then crashed back to into non-league. Burton went up to Championship and are now fighting to avoid falling to League Two.
McElhenney and Reynolds do seem to have a vision for how the club becomes more financially independent of them when they eventually pass on the torch and ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ has run its course. Amid all the celebrity-spotting when Birmingham City visited The Racecourse for the so-called ‘Hollywood derby’ in January, the presence of Kaleen and Eric Allyn in executive seats was widely missed.
The Allyns, who sold their family’s medical device company for more than $2billion in 2015, have invested in Wrexham and Kaleen sits on the board. Yet my two visits to St Andrews this season have told me that Birmingham, currently top of League One, are the ones who feel fare more ready for that promotion, with big money, a big vision and big fan base.
Reynolds and McElhenney appear to have a sustainable vision for the club but haven’t dramatically improved facilities off the pitch
So that’s it, then. There, typed out in black and white, is my fervent wish that we’re not promoted. Except… I have a ticket for Rotherham at home on Saturday and will travel in hope of three points. I’ve picked up a re-sale ticket for the Stockport County home match too – a raucous local rivalry where three points are always richly savoured.
Exeter and Wycombe, Wigan and Blackpool – we want to beat them all, which might just mean we go up. There’s the football experience for you – full of eternal hope and optimism, confounding rationale and the cold light of day.
The extraordinary cost of European match-going
I’ve been furnished with a study of the costs of the ‘cheapest’ seats at the next two weeks’ Champions League games by the global price comparison site SeatPick.com who discuss ways to ‘snag a cheap ticket’.
‘Cheap’ by whose definition? The cheapest last 16 seat you’ll get for any of our teams is for the Arsenal v PSV second leg next week, at £147.74, and then £167.66 for Aston Villa v Club Bruges.
The cheapest seat for PSG vs Liverpool is £232.32 and then £233.23 for the Anfield leg. Extraordinary. The football gravy train really knows no limits.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
We pulled down an interior wall at the weekend and found a copy of the Holyhead and Anglesey Chronicle of February 13, 1975, shoved inside between some bricks.
Bethesda Athletic’s Billy Conlon grabbed the headlines in the ‘Sports Scene’ section by throwing his jersey at the referee before stalking off the field in a 3-1 home defeat to Caernarfon Town. He’d been ‘doing a Kevin Keegan’ the paper said, in reference to Keegan’s dismissal with Leeds’ Billy Bremner earlier that season. Easy to forget that it wasn’t always a bed of roses for refs back then, either.
