Wrexham need more than just belief to make it to Premier League – but might already have it
Conversations in press boxes around League One invariably turns to the promotion race, and the comment about Wrexham is always the same: “I didn’t think much of them when they played us.”
The stats bear that out. Despite sitting second in the table, Wrexham rank just 13th for expected goals, 12th for actual goals and ninth for expected goals conceded – but, in fairness, second for actual goals conceded, a remarkable over-achievement aided significantly by first-choice goalkeeper Arthur Okonkwo boasting the best save percentage rate in the division, a whopping 79.3%.
There’s always a team like this in an EFL promotion race, and it is rarely entirely down to good luck alone, not when there’s a massive 46 games for that to average itself out. To make team after team go away complaining that ‘actually they were nothing special’…that’s a skill in itself.
Wrexham have mastered that strange and borderline inexplicable ability, and it has put them just eight games away from the Championship.
Their promotion is by no means a sure thing yet – Wycombe Wanderers sit just three points behind them with a game in hand and a superior goal difference.
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But Wycombe also have one of the toughest remaining fixture lists in the division, with their final nine games including meetings with six of the sides currently vying for a play-off place. Wrexham, on the other hand, have one of the kindest run-ins: a home game against Charlton on the penultimate day is the only time they play anyone currently higher than 10th.
If it was going to be anyone, it was going to be Wrexham. The conversation around the club has naturally revolved around their unlikely new-found worldwide popularity courtesy of an admittedly very good documentary built around their high-profile owners.
This is a club benefiting not just from the new injection of wealth that has brought, but from the enormous and quite possibly unprecedented wave of good feeling that has enveloped Wrexham over the past five years. They have become unstoppable in no small part because they believe they are unstoppable.
Plenty of other clubs in the past have come up from non-league with money, reached League One and found that to be their limit. Wrexham have been given good reason to believe they have no such ceiling, and have duly gone most of the way to smashing right through it.
Completing the job would leave the Premier League dream as Wrexham’s last remaining objective – and, naturally, their toughest challenge.
Wrexham have excelled at recycling and improving their squad year on year, with millions pumped into the club that are not available to many of their rivals to this point – but carrying that on in the second tier would take another level of investment altogether.
The further up they go, the more Wrexham become just another football club. They would be entering a league where wage caps are no longer a thing, where the average club’s accounts show a £20m annual loss, and where the highest wage bill can be more than five times bigger than the lowest. All that while Wrexham are still working on renovations to their stadium, a new training ground and a new academy.
Wrexham are well ahead of that, though. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney brought in new minority investors earlier this season in the shape of New York-based medical equipment magnates the Allyn family.
Reynolds, in particular, has form for that kind of move: he has previously served as the public face and part-owner of a mobile phone company and a gin brand before selling his stakes and remaining on as a face for the brand.
Assuming he has the same intentions here and can enable Wrexham’s fame to be milked yet further, further investors may not be far away. And who knows how far they can keep going from there?