Culture
Wrexham are a good story, yes, but they are no footballing fairytale
Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt’s tweet was dripping with Lancastrian sarcasm.
“Congratulations Ryan, I honestly don’t know how you do it! Fabulous achievement. Best of luck with the treble,” it read.
He was replying to Wrexham co-owner Ryan Reynolds’ celebratory post following his side’s second successive promotion.
Holt is one of English football’s most intriguing characters and is about as divisive as the team on the receiving end of his post. Wrexham are the British game’s Marmite club — other teams’ fans love or hate them — and following their promotion to League One along with Stockport County last weekend, the debate is back with fresh fervour.
Congratulations Ryan, I honestly don’t know how you do it! Fabulous achievement 👏👏👏
Best of luck with the treble ❤️👍 https://t.co/IidWw4KeX0
— Andyh (@AndyhHolt) April 14, 2024
You can forgive Holt, a local businessman who made his fortune in the plastics industry and has invested heavily in his hometown club since assuming control in 2015, for his tongue-in-cheek reply to Reynolds. It was congratulatory while pulling off an exquisite ironic dig at Wrexham’s achievements given their sizeable budget for a fourth-tier club.
There is also the fact Holt has history with Reynolds and Wrexham’s other Hollywood star co-owner Rob McElhenney. They have not always seen eye to eye on matters such as streaming income and ticket prices. Maybe there is something to be said for staking out the moral high ground, for taking a deep breath in times like these and rising above. But this is football — an industry that thrives on petty grudges.
Reynolds and McElhenney celebrating promotion to the National League a year ago (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
Most neutrals are self-aware enough to acknowledge a degree of jealousy when looking at what Wrexham have achieved since Reynolds and McElhenney took over in 2021.
Aside from the investment, the international exposure and the obvious respect both have for the north Wales club and the town they represent, the actors are annoyingly difficult to dislike. Their self-aware japes, like when they tried to learn Welsh in the Welcome To Wrexham documentary series, and their witty social media posts make it far more difficult to be cynical about their intentions.
They are public-facing in a way that allows accountability, going against the tide of too many absent or elusive owners in the EFL. They have shown touches of class around memorials to the Gresford Colliery mining disaster, surprise charity donations and fan engagement. New big-name international sponsors including Expedia, TikTok and United Airlines have arrived, along with grand plans for new stands at the Racecourse ground. And on-pitch, they have had clear success. Manager Phil Parkinson oversaw a record-breaking points tally on the way to winning the National League title last season to pull Wrexham out of the fifth tier of the English football pyramid after 15 years.
Fan culture in Europe and the U.S. on The Athletic
And they have now done it again, achieving back-to-back promotions for the first time in the club’s 160-year history, once again with the Welcome To Wrexham cameras in tow. The series has brought new fans and attention to the EFL, particularly from the U.S. And this has, in part, led to record domestic and international TV deals — worth £935million ($1.2bn) over five years and £148m over four respectively to the EFL.
So what is not to like? What harm is the Wrexham story doing to football?
If you ask most other fans in England and Wales, quite a lot. Here is where the bubble bursts if you believe Wrexham to be an against-all-odds tale.
Wrexham are not underdogs, at least not in the league. There is a case to be made for underdog status in their FA Cup runs which saw them play Blackburn Rovers, Sheffield United and Coventry City, three sides much higher up the domestic football pyramid in the last two seasons. But when a team have the most money in the division, they have an advantage over the rest. Wrexham are not the first club to use their financial muscle to progress up the leagues. They will not be the last.
Stockport have been on a similar journey up from the National League and carry one of the highest wage bills in League Two this season. Fleetwood Town, now an established league club, did the same in 2012 and 2014. This season’s National League champions, Chesterfield, have spent plenty to get back into the EFL.
GO DEEPER
Chesterfield are heading back to the EFL and have no intention of standing still
The latest set of Wrexham accounts, covering the 2022-23 season, show their wage bill was £6.9million, with losses of £5.1m. Both figures were 1) records for the National League, and 2) higher than all League Two teams that season and most of League One, too. It is an unprecedented amount of money to spend in the lower leagues and as a point of comparison, Accrington lost £785,000 in the same period, when they were a third-tier side.
Stockport also celebrated promotion this weekend (Jess Hornby/Getty Images)
There is no shame in spending big, especially when it works and when your revenue is as big as Wrexham’s was last year (£10.5million — again, more than any other side in the fifth-tier National League or League Two). More money helps attract better players and so the league table often reflects each team’s spending. Only when a club endure a bad season or feel the constraints of the EFL’s financial fair play rules (usually once they reach the second-tier Championship) is there reason to worry.
Where Wrexham have done lots of good for football, the gradual hiking-up of salaries in the lower divisions has been a serious concern to clubs constrained by much smaller margins but trying to compete.
Wrexham’s financial clout and subsequent easy progress straight through League Two was to be expected and it probably will not be until they reach the Championship — or their owners run out of cash or enthusiasm for the project — that we will see what this sort of growth really means. The accounts are hard proof: Wrexham are a good story, yes, but they are no fairytale. This clip on CBS, and the replies, sums it all up perfectly of just how divisive they have become.
“Wrexham and their TV show is doing as much for soccer in America as MLS is doing right now.” 🏴🇺🇸
A (now) third-tier football club from Northern Wales has pulled off back-to-back promotions and the Morning Footy crew couldn’t be happier 👏 pic.twitter.com/bFIy6G3Prq
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) April 15, 2024
What rankles so many League One and Two and National League fans is that while the story of a post-industrial town that has fallen on hard times with an underperforming/downtrodden football club has captured global attention, it is a story that applies to swathes of the EFL. You could swap out Wrexham for Grimsby Town, Wigan Athletic, Hartlepool United, Newport County or Accrington. None of those clubs means any less to their community just because there are no TV cameras to show it.
Maybe all this says more about fan culture in the UK than we care to admit.
The healthy position in all this is to sit somewhere in the middle. For every moment of admiration for what Wrexham are doing, a sprinkling of awareness of their wage bill or a dash of cynicism around the narrative that they are ‘the only club like it in the world’ should provide a perfectly seasoned outlook.
But balance? A healthy attitude to what other teams in your division are doing? Anything other than disdain for new ideas, new fans and a barrage of media attention for a club other than your own? You will not find that in the EFL. You’re better off trying Disney+ for it instead.
GO DEEPER
Welcome to Wrexham… in League One: What happens next?
(Top photo: Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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