An intriguing discovery at Wrexham recently highlighted just how much the club has transformed since its days before Hollywood ownership. A forgotten email resurfaced, addressed to all employees, announcing the arrival of a new coffee machine. Back then, the message reached just 17 recipients.
Fast forward to today, and the club’s staff has expanded dramatically to over 150, with new faces joining almost daily. This growth is spurred by Wrexham’s ambitious goal to climb from the National League to the Premier League within four seasons, matching their on-field successes with off-field developments.
Despite these changes, the value of the original 17 employees remains undiminished. This was evident as Iwan Pugh-Jones and Paul Chaloner stood under the sun on Tuesday, watching the team prepare for Saturday’s FA Cup fifth-round clash with Chelsea at the Racecourse Ground.
In those earlier days, head groundsman Chaloner faced challenges as he tried to maintain a playable pitch, while manager Phil Parkinson had to conduct training on the same field. Meanwhile, kitman Pugh-Jones struggled to fit two new industrial washing machines into his cramped kit room, made only slightly more spacious by removing an interior wall.
This week paints a different picture. Chaloner, a steadfast Wrexham loyalist, now gazes upon a sparkling, state-of-the-art £1.7 million pitch, complete with plastic stitching woven into the grass, laid down last summer to Premier League standards. The club’s journey from survival mode to thriving ambition is beautifully embodied in this transformation.
New staff arrive almost by the day as Wrexham, seeking an unprecedented rise from National League to Premier League in four seasons, try to keep up with the pace of on-field progress
Head groundsman Paul Chaloner (left) and kitman Iwan Pugh-Jones in the sunshine on Tuesday, watching the players run out to train for Saturday’s visit of Chelsea
It’s tempting to see the club as one simply happy to be at the heady heights of sixth in the Championship, five years on from Rob McElhenney (left) and Ryan Reynolds buying it. Not so
Pugh-Jones has double the number of industrial washing machines, an assistant to help him, and feels a spotlight which demands that he run his operation to top-flight standard.
‘They still moan!’ Pugh-Jones says of the players. ‘But we’re in the public eye in a way that we weren’t three years ago. Everything has to be right.’ UEFA will stage Euro Under-19 games here this summer. ‘People have expectations,’ says Chaloner. ‘Everybody is watching us.’
The old friends used to drive down to away games together in the club’s 15-year-old Transit van, though Pugh-Jones always heads out the day before now. It’s a club VW Crafter he drives.
The fundamental challenge for Wrexham is staring at us as we gaze across the pitch: the vacant spot, occupied by cranes in recent months, where the club’s new 5,500-seat Kop stand, designed by the architects of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the immersive Las Vegas Sphere, will eventually be built – distinctively rendered with the famous local terracotta-red clay brick once manufactured in the village of Ruabon, 10 miles away.
Planning, funding and environmental problems have painfully delayed progress and mean it won’t be completed until April or May of next year. It means this rapidly expanding club, whose three-sided ground seats 10,600, remains compressed into the old rabbit warren of corridors and rooms which Liam Rosenior’s players will encounter this weekend. A new reception area, operational since just before Christmas, has been formed out of a former broom cupboard.
It’s tempting, therefore, to see the club as one simply happy to be at the heady heights of sixth in the Championship, precisely five years on from Rob McElhenney, now known as Rob Mac, and Ryan Reynolds buying it. Not so.
They are very confident that they will soon be playing teams like Chelsea on a weekly basis and you don’t need to spend long on the inside to sense that they don’t view it as a question of if, but when. They are actively planning for the top flight.
At the Financial Times Business of Football conference at London’s Peninsula Hotel last week, Wrexham’s American chief executive Michael Williamson, a former Inter Milan chief strategy officer and FC Miami CEO recruited by Reynolds and Mac two years ago, shared a platform with his opposite numbers from Brighton and Juventus, Paul Barber and Damien Comolli.
Wrexham, the Championship’s best performing side since Christmas, have 57 points and face two huge home games next week to push towards their target of 71 for a play-off place
In January, Wrexham signalled their ambitions by joining the race for Guinean forward Sidiki Cherif (left), who ended up at Fenerbahce
‘It’s quite a privilege. Little old Wrexham in there!’ Williamson says when he and I talk, the following morning, but he has no compunction about saying which top-flight clubs Wrexham are looking to as models of how to approach the Premier League.
Bournemouth are comparable, with their 11,000-capacity stadium, while the chairman of Brentford, Cliff Crown, is someone Williamson took the chance to quiz on the subject of Premier League survival and growth when they found themselves sitting together at dinner last week.
‘I was hearing about how they scaled up and their journey. How they arrived there, what they took and how they have been able to do it,’ Williamson says of Brentford.
‘So, I think if you look at those three clubs – call them the Triple Bs: Brentford, Bournemouth and Brighton – they look at what’s going to differentiate them and how they’re going to be able to accomplish that. We can take learnings from those three.
‘We can also take some lessons from some of the ones that weren’t successful – that maybe got promoted to the Premier League and then came back down the pyramid. Ultimately, we want to do it the Wrexham way. We’ve done things differently and that’s what has allowed us to arrive here.’
That ‘difference’, of course, is the global marketing appeal of the owners and their Welcome to Wrexham documentary, which has seen the club report £13.2m in annual commercial revenues and attract sponsors like United Airlines and Meta Quest.
‘We have the platform, in Rob and Ryan, to amplify all that we have,’ Williamson says. ‘Now we have to sprint to catch up with the foundation for that and invest in the infrastructure below it.’
The Hollywood gold dust has allowed the club to continue buying players who can keep Wrexham climbing – 66 arrivals, at a total cost of £38.8m in five years and 237 points accrued since promotion to the Football League in 2023: more than any other EFL or Premier League team.
Winning promotion from League One in April last year, lifting them into the second tier for the first time since 1982
The recruitment of Williamson underlined the ambition. He, in turn, has brought in Rob Faulkner, a British former head of communications for Inter Milan and the European Club Association, as Wrexham’s chief business and communications officer. Wrexham executives have not tended to arrive from such places in the past.
The masterplan for reaching the top flight also includes making that three-sided stadium Premier League-ready, with no plans to await the outcome of the play-offs – as Luton Town did – before ramping up the cramped media and broadcast facilities, which have changed little since the National League days. Plans are under consideration to create a new Premier League-standard press box in the modern Macron Stand, across the ground from the current facility, this summer.
‘We have to find 250 seats for journalists,’ Williamson says. ‘From a Premier League perspective, the biggest works would be meeting broadcast needs. These are all things that we’re currently mapping out so that we’re ready for it when it happens. We know it needs to be done, so why not do it over the summer?’
The Kop won’t be finished and fully fitted out until April or May next year. But also under consideration are plans, which worked for Fulham with their state-of-the-art Riverside Stand, of opening some areas of seating before the entire structure is complete.
Plans are also in train to bring facilities at the club’s Colliers Park training ground, leased from the Welsh FA, in line with those of a Premier League player’s expectation. ‘If you look at what some of the other clubs out there have done – like Brighton, Brentford – popping in some modular buildings, that’s something that we could look to do,’ Williamson says, describing the prefabricated demountables at both clubs’ training grounds.
The pace of progress has surpassed anything that Lesley Griffiths, Welsh Labour Senedd Member for Wrexham and a former Welsh Government minister, anticipated when Reynolds and Mac made her one of the people they called five years ago to offer assurances about their plans for the club’s future.
‘There’s been extraordinary ambition,’ she says. ‘The promotions are only part of it. The club’s Community Foundation used to have three staff. Now they have 35. Quietly, they’re doing so much work behind the scenes and promotion to the Premier League would qualify them for another £1m of funding.’
Out across Wrexham, there are signs of how the place has caught the wave of the past five years. The Old Holt Lodge has been revamped into ‘Hotel Wrexham’. Wrexham Lager, now half-owned by Reynolds and Mac, is opening a new brewery, taproom and museum over the distinctive railway bridge approach to the ground.
Wrexham want the visit of clubs like Chelsea to happen on a weekly basis next season, and are putting in the necessary work to be ready for the top flight if it happens
A Phil Parkinson mural outside The Turf pub attests to the town’s affection for the manager who has kept the team climbing
The manufacturers of Kellogg’s cereal are building a huge £20m expanded facility here, rather than in Trafford, creating a factory which will be adorned by the image of a 20ft cockerel.
One of the stars of the Welcome to Wrexham documentary, Wayne Jones, landlord of The Turf pub, will also invest, with his establishment’s owners, to create a permanent fanzone adjacent to the stadium this summer. ‘We want to move with the team and create a facility which would stand tall in the Premier League,’ Jones says. ‘We don’t want to let the side down and be the poor relation.’
More work is still needed. The lack of hotel rooms means numerous visiting fans must seek affordable overnight stays in rival city Chester, 13 miles away over the border, at a time when many buildings in Wrexham’s centre are still boarded up. ‘I’m not sure that as a city we’ve done as much as we can do yet, when it comes to tourism,’ says Griffiths. ‘And some of that lies with the council.’
The infrastructure work, significant though it may be, pales by comparison with the biggest challenge Wrexham would face if they make it up this season: equipping themselves with a squad which can survive in the top flight.
Their promotion ambitions were revealed in the January window when they were prepared to max out their allowable spending within EFL sustainability limits, with £20m put aside for a top striker, and a right wing-back also sought. They competed with Crystal Palace and Fenerbahce for £19m-rated Guinean forward Sidiki Cherif, who eventually went on loan to the Turkish club.
Even Burnley’s £218.8m squad has a valuation four times bigger than Wrexham’s and the club would need another of the annual radical squad overhauls in which players are dispensed with.
The club have no plans to bring in a sporting director, taking the view that they have strong collective knowledge and contacts on their ‘transfer committee’, through Parkinson, Williamson – who brings insight on Europe and South America – and adviser Les Reed, the experienced and respected former Southampton director of football and FA technical chief, whose wise counsel has served the club well in the past five years. ‘We have a lot of people looking at the player markets,’ Williamson says.
Wrexham have established good relationships with agents but could follow the example of Ipswich, who did loan deals with Manchester City and Chelsea for young players like Liam Delap and Omari Hutchinson. The success of wing back Issa Kabore, on loan from City, is a template. Contracts would need relegation clauses and the club may need to be prepared to come straight back down.
The masterplan to reach the top flight also includes making their three-sided stadium Premier League-ready
The far greater levels of investment needed saw Reynolds and Mac announce in December that Apollo Sports Capital, part of one of the world’s largest private equity firms and soon-to-be majority shareholders of Atletico Madrid, had taken a minority stake in Wrexham.
Some view ‘private equity’ in football with suspicion, though Williamson insists this is Wrexham needing finance to expand, not a handout. Expert financial opinion sought by Daily Mail Sport about the Apollo deal backs this assertion up. ‘Apollo could invest anywhere, with a new £5billion fund. It’s a positive that they’ve chosen this club,’ says a financial expert who has worked with a number of teams.
Some on the inside at Wrexham see 71 points as the tally necessary to secure a Championship play-off spot. But in the spring sunshine at the Racecourse on Tuesday, some of the early users of that formative coffee machine had only thoughts for Chelsea.
They include Kerry Evans, disability liaison officer and another of those 17 originals, whose accomplishments in the face of adversity was captured in a brilliant memoir Stronger than You Think, which was one of last year’s sports publishing gems.
Pugh-Jones remembers how he used to juggle the kitman role with that of Chaloner’s unofficial assistant, on days when they had to tape up the broken white-line marker for the pitch and ration the fertilizer supplies.
‘We were in the motorway services on the way back from Charlton last weekend when we met some Sheffield United fans who asked us, “When are you going to stop winning?”,’ Pugh-Jones relates. ‘It was hard to answer that.’
