Winnipeg, Adelaide, Malaysia — meet the fans on Wrexham pilgrimage

Times

02-05-2025

Wednesday morning in Wrexham; it is four days since an event of global significance took place here. And, yes, I know you're thinking that 'global significance' sounds plain daft when attached to the 3-0 scoreline of a football match, but charmingly and very strangely, it actually isn't at all.
Between the station and The SToK Racecourse Ground, where this global happening took place, there is a Premier Inn where I am having a morning cuppa with Mel and Annette Glover, 61 and 57, from Fallon, Nevada, who are talking me through why it is that they felt they needed to be here.
They start by explaining their emotional connection — yes, between Nevada and this working-class town in north Wales. They were here last week for a day, too. 'We liked it so much,' says Mel, 'we decided we had to come back.' Perfect bookends to their holiday.
It was in between that Wrexham beat Charlton Athletic 3-0 to secure their third successive promotion, this time from League One, an unprecedented achievement that produced outlandish pictures of celebration that included their Hollywood owners, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, pulling pints in The Turf, the pub beside the ground.
Mel and Annette watched from a pub in Ellesmere. 'We decided not to get tickets,' Annette says. 'We were worried about being typical pushy Americans and taking tickets from the locals.'
I tell them they are very respectful. 'So are the people here,' Mel says.
It all started when Mel heard about the documentary series, Welcome to Wrexham. Annette thought it was probably not for her but said: 'I'll watch an episode with you.' And now? 'We've watched the whole thing twice.'
And now Wrexham have won promotion (a concept Americans struggle to understand) to the Championship, which Annette says she finds somewhat bemusing too. Why? 'Because the names are funny. Everyone says we want to get to the Premier League, but 'the Championship' sounds better than 'the Premier League'. '
At least they have the ultimate souvenir, which is a selfie with Wayne Jones, the publican of The Turf, one of the lead characters in the Disney+ documentary. 'We wanted to have a beer and a burger in The Turf,' Mel says. They enjoyed it so much they went back for more of that, too.
After saying goodbye, I bump into Luke and Moraid from Winnipeg, Luke proud in his Wrexham shirt, wheeling their bags back to the station. They had also got a selfie with Jones.
Jones reckons he does up to two dozen such selfies daily. Most memorable was the group from Malaysia who flew in, arrived 40 minutes before kick-off, saw the game and flew straight home again.
Luke and Moraid had also thought long and hard about going to the Charlton game. Moraid was doing the London Marathon the next morning and they finally conceded it was mad to do both. So next time they will come for a match.
'I wanted to experience the things I've seen on TV,' Luke says. 'It [ Welcome to Wrexham ] paints the community in such a positive light, right? A kind of a working-class town, maybe down on their luck a bit, the power of sport uniting people.'
Luke and Moraid were similarly conscious about the impression they might make here. 'You know: 'These wankers are only here because of the TV show, they don't really care'. Right? But everyone was just so positive and happy and proud.
'We went to a restaurant last night and they specially made Welsh rarebit for us, because I was like: I'm in Wales, I want try Welsh rarebit.'
And thus did our conversation segue to the Winnipeg Jets, their local ice hockey team and finally, for the first and surely last time ever, I heard someone manage to squeeze the names of Wayne Gretzky, the GOAT of ice hockey, and Paul Mullin, the out-of-favour Wrexham striker, into the same sentence.
The thing about these such apparently random interactions is they are actually two-a-penny here in this town. Remember, this is midweek, between games, and there is literally nothing happening.
Yet, in The Turf at lunchtime are a family from the Netherlands, another from Adelaide and Jennie and Ross Adams, a retired couple from Redcliffe, north of Brisbane.
'Our daughter used to come round to our place to use the washing machine,' Jennie says. 'She'd put it [ Welcome to Wrexham ] on and say: 'Come and have a look at this'. ' That is why they finished up here.
This is all anecdotal. The document that establishes conclusively that the 3-0 win against Charlton was a global event is the visitors' book in the club shop. Sometimes they arrive here by the coachload and there in the book are their names and addresses, hundreds of them each month, from almost all round the world. Principally Americans, then Aussies and Canadians, heaps of Scandis and middle Europeans.
'You've warmed many a cold Wisconsin night,' wrote the group from Sturgeon Bay. 'Thank you. Go Dragons!'
And this from John, from Connecticut: 'This team formed a relationship with my father that I never had. Thank you.'
Most conspicuously absent here are visitors from the Far East. The documentary has yet to be marketed there with appropriate subtitles, but that is now inevitable. Nevertheless, the club's latest accounts show that Wrexham is now making more revenue from overseas than from within the UK. The statement in point is the stadium's name sponsor, SToK, being a product (coffee) that you can't even buy here.
It all feels very giddy and unreal but also incredibly fortuitous. The documentary obviously markets the club globally, but no one could have guessed at — and certainly not budgeted for — the club's revenue being built on this free-spending super-fandom subculture that stretches from Redcliffe to Winnipeg and that has persuaded overseas companies to come in as sponsors.
You get the impression, too, that the cocktail here, the feeling, if you like, is all quite fragile. The club has grown exponentially, it has climbed through the leagues and you have different groups — die-hard fans, new fans, overseas fans and Hollywood owners — who could easily start pulling in different directions.
And let's not completely swoon here. Not a single penny from the documentary goes to the club; that is all owned by Reynolds and McElhenney.
Nevertheless, they are both such regular and wholehearted visitors here that natural, initial suspicions have dissolved. The tone they have set in the documentary also seems crucial to maintaining the ecosystem: it's not about them, it's about the club, the town, the history and the blue-collar integrity of the people you feel they have come to love.
And maybe that is just a story they've written and cleverly plonked themselves into the middle of. But that would make them unfeasibly cunning con men.
Either way, they have achieved something preposterous; they have persuaded millions around the world that Wrexham is somewhere you go to on a pilgrimage and that you come here behaving like you are on sacred ground.
The hosts of the podcast Fearless In Devotion did a live recording last week and there was a New Yorker in the audience who was on his ninth visit. People come to Wrexham wanting to take them out, buy them food and be sponges for their knowledge. Explain to us, they say, the anecdote about the robin mascot who cycled round the pitch on a rusty bicycle. Some tell them that, were it not for the kids in school, they'd move here.
'It's very important, to overseas visitors, that you enjoy their company too,' Tim Andrews, one of the hosts, says. 'I've noticed that they really feel like there's a certain stigma attached where people think they are just here as tourists.'
All of which makes Wrexham seem, for now, strangely special, certainly unique, impervious to the tugging strains of the big time. And that will all be put to a greater test when they go up to the next level, when they will have to spend more and be even more commercially orientated.
Yet hopes still thrive. No one here thinks the Premier League is round the corner, but they do believe it is just about in sight. Even if the Championship does sound more important.