Culture
Welcome to Wrexham… in League One: What happens next?
As Wrexham’s lap of honour after clinching a second promotion in as many years reached the Tech End, where the Racecourse Ground’s most vociferous supporters can be found, Paul Mullin decided to take charge of the PA microphone.
“I saw my mate the other day,
He said to me he’d seen the ‘white Pele’,
So I asked, ‘Who is he?’
He goes by the name of Elliot Lee…”
Mullin’s voice may not quite match the standard of his finishing in front of goal. But the thousands of partying supporters didn’t care, as they joined in with a song that, like its subject, has become a real terrace favourite these past couple of years.
(Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
Next up was a ditty in honour of Arthur Okonkwo, the on-loan Arsenal goalkeeper. By now, the microphone had been returned to its rightful owner but that didn’t matter as the 22-year-old danced along to the fans chanting his name.
Over the next 10 or so minutes, most of the squad received a name-check, including Mullin, James McClean, Steven Fletcher, Ollie Palmer and Max Cleworth, the clearly shy defender being touchingly nudged forward to bask in the adoration by captain Ben Tozer.
It felt fitting, because promotion had been a real team effort, from Lee’s early goals which helped make up for the absence of the injured Mullin in the early weeks of the season or how new arrivals Okonkwo, McClean and George Evans helped take Wrexham to the next level.
Then there was Cleworth, who made the right-sided centre-half position his own from Christmas onwards, despite his only starts in the opening months coming in the cups as manager Phil Parkinson rotated his squad.
Max Cleworth and Ryan Barnett celebrate promotion (Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
All have a strong case to be named what has to be the most keenly-fought Player of the Year award in a long, long time, as does Mullin for hitting such a rich vein of form at just the right time.
The togetherness that has powered Wrexham to back-to-back promotions will be tested again next season, when the club returns to the third tier for the first time since 2005.
Parkinson admits the step up is likely to be a “bigger one” than last summer’s return to the EFL. But he also believes there’s plenty more to come from a club whose highest-ever position is 15th in the old Second Division (now the Championship).
“We have progressed quickly,” says the 56-year-old. “But I said last year when we won promotion (from the National League) that there’s a lot more chapters to be written. I firmly believe that’s still the case now.”
So, what can Wrexham expect next season? Are they equipped to thrive once again at a higher level? And what personnel changes will be needed?
How will life in the third tier differ to the last couple of years?
You only have to look at some of the teams who Wrexham could face next season to realise just what a big deal this promotion is for a club who not so long ago seemed marooned in non-League.
For a start, there’s a trio of clubs who were in the Premier League — Reading, Wigan Athletic and Charlton Athletic — in the not-too-distant past. Portsmouth, the 2008 FA Cup winners, are going up, probably to be joined by Derby County. But that still leaves Bolton Wanderers, currently sitting third in the table, potentially on the roster for next season.
Charlton Athletic are one of the bigger sides in League One currently (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Then, there are the sides in danger of dropping out of the Championship. As it stands with three games remaining, Sheffield Wednesday and Huddersfield Town, a Premier League team just five years ago, occupy the final two relegation places above already doomed Rotherham United.
But Birmingham City, Stoke City and Queens Park Rangers could all yet drop, opening up the possibility of not only some big-name visitors to The Racecourse next season but also some cracking away trips to famous old grounds such as Hillsborough or St Andrew’s.
Midfielder Lee is certainly relishing the step up. “There could be some massive teams in League One next year,” he says. “We’ve come so far from being in the National League a year ago to be potentially playing massive teams next season.
“It will be hard next year. But that’s why we are here — we want to test ourselves against better players and better teams.”
Will Wrexham suddenly be up against rivals with much deeper pockets?
There’s no doubt the spending power of their new peers will be much bigger. Wednesday, for instance, had a wage bill of £14million ($17.4m) in a 2022-23 season that saw Darren Moore’s side clinch promotion via the League One play-offs.
Even with their Hollywood backing, Wrexham are unlikely to be able to top such a sum. However, the Welsh club’s extraordinary ability to generate cash — revenue for the current season has soared beyond £20million, putting them on a par with most Championship outfits — means they’ll be competitive in the market.
With League One clubs allowed to spend up to 60 per cent of their annual turnover on wages (up from 55 per cent in League Two), Wrexham’s healthy balance sheet should provide Parkinson with the necessary funds.
How do promoted teams usually fare in League One?
In the last five seasons, five clubs have gone straight back down just a year after winning promotion, including Carlisle United this time around. Forest Green Rovers, Swindon Town, Northampton Town and Tranmere Rovers complete the list, while Bury disappeared altogether after being declared bankrupt before the 2018-19 campaign got under way.
More encouragingly, the three teams who went up automatically last season have all adapted well with Stevenage, Leyton Orient and Northampton sitting ninth, 10th and 11th respectively.
Those expecting another tilt at success by Wrexham in 2024-25 may wish to take note of how no promoted team has gone up again the following season since 2018-19. Or, in fact, even made the play-offs, underlining just how difficult a step up this can be.
Are we expecting a busy summer in the transfer market?
Yes. Unlike a year ago when Wrexham needed just a bit of fine-tuning thanks to a recruitment model that had effectively future-proofed the squad by prioritising players with League Two experience when still in the National League, this time around more of an overhaul will be needed.
Parkinson admitted as much following his fifth career promotion as a manager. “We can now start planning for the summer and build a squad which can hopefully be competitive,” he says.
Any overhaul is likely to be helped by several senior players being out of contract, including three centre-halves in Aaron Hayden, Jordan Tunnicliffe and captain Tozer. Luke Young, the club’s longest-serving player, is another whose current deal expires on June 30 along with defender Callum McFadzean and goalkeeping duo Rob Lainton and Mark Howard.
Okonkwo’s loan also ends in a couple of weeks, the 22-year-old possibly becoming a free agent with Arsenal yet to offer a contract extension. If he does leave the Emirates Stadium, expect a scramble for his signature. Whether Wrexham would be part of that perhaps depends on his wage demands, the club having paid just under half his current salary this season with Arsenal picking up the rest.
Arthur Okonkwo’s loan from Arsenal has been a successful one (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
Where do Wrexham need to strengthen?
Goalkeeper is obviously one. Potentially losing three centre-halves also means this area will have to be looked at, though the emergence of Cleworth these past few months is likely to save Wrexham some money.
Midfield looks strong with George Evans, Andy Cannon and Elliot Lee all having played in the Championship, never mind the third tier. As do the two wing-back slots, with McClean still the fittest member of the squad a week or so short of his 35th birthday and Ryan Barnett finishing this season strongly. Jacob Mendy and Luke Bolton respectively bring competition to the wide areas.
Mullin’s experience in League One is limited to just half a season at Tranmere Rovers. But, like a fine wine, he’s improving with age and will expect to score goals in the third tier.
What will perhaps be key this summer is finding a partner that dove-tails with the Liverpudlian’s attributes. Palmer and Fletcher, 32 and 37 respectively, have made telling contributions this season but the step up is likely to mean a younger upgrade is required, even though Palmer has 12 months remaining on his contract.
Veteran Steven Fletcher (left) is out of contract this summer (Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
Reasons to be optimistic for 2024-25?
The manager. Not only is Parkinson well versed at this level, having taken charge of several League One clubs in a little over two decades as a manager. But he’s also steered two of those to runners-up spot — Colchester United in 2006 and Bolton Wanderers 11 years later — as well as taking Bradford City to the play-offs.
(Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
He also has the respect and backing of the dressing room, as Eoghan O’Connell makes clear. “Ask anyone in the dressing room,” says the Irish defender, “they can’t speak highly enough about the gaffer. He is someone you want to play for, someone you want to run through a brick wall for.
“He gets it right in terms of how he deals with people. The way he carries himself rubs off on you and makes us want to do more for him. So level-headed, too. Whether we win, lose or draw, I’d say he is the best I’ve ever worked with in terms of you turn up on Monday and everything is geared towards the next moment.”
How far can Wrexham realistically climb to?
O’Connell is in no doubt as to the potential. “This club can become as big as it wants,” insists the former Celtic defender. “Wrexham are global. That hit us all in the summer, when we were in North Carolina playing Chelsea (in a pre-season friendly).
“I remember being in the tunnel before the warm-up. They went out and there was a little roar. We then went out and the place really lifted. That’s why I say it is a global club.
“I also think back to Halifax away last year and the numbers we took (4,500 fans made the trip). We got beat but I remember thinking in the warm-up it was similar to a Celtic away day when I was there as a younger player.
(Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
“I do think with the fanbase, the people involved running the club and the owners, the world is your oyster, really.”
Is there an example for Wrexham to follow on their return to League One?
A year of consolidation wouldn’t be a bad thing, especially after back-to-back promotions. So, maybe any one of the trio who went up automatically a year ago.
Lee, however, believes Luton Town, the club he left to join Wrexham in 2022, can be the ultimate inspiration after going all the way from the National League to the Premier League in just nine years.
“Anything can happen,” he says. “Look at my old club Luton. When I left, I said I wanted a project similar to Luton. I wanted to go up the leagues and Wrexham fitted the bill.
“Of course, you can’t get ahead of yourself. And I’m not saying we will be in the Premier League any time soon. But I am saying we have all the foundations to be a successful club.
“It has the potential to go all the way, thanks to the backing of the owners and the staff we have here. I’ve always said this place reminds me of Luton, in that it’s a great environment to work in every day and people come here to work hard.
Luton were promoted from the National League in 2014 and winning away at Everton in the Premier League nine years later (Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
“Special things can happen. I’ve said that since I came here and I know that because of what we had at Luton. Look at them now in the Premier League.”
With Luton the last promoted team from League Two to go straight up again 12 months later — a feat they achieved in 2017-18 after finishing as champions of the third tier — Wrexham could certainly do a lot worse than study a club whose average gates at a cramped Kenilworth Road are similar to those at the Racecourse.
(Header photo: Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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