The Rise of Wrexham: Part One

Reader, I have a confession to make. I am hopelessly hooked on Football Manager. Ever since I moved into a flat full of FM fans back in 2017, I’ve not been able to put this game down. I’ve played it on a plane, I’ve played it on a train, I’ve played it at shops and I’ve played it in my socks. I’d be only too happy to play it in a box or with a fox. As such, this game seemed like a natural choice for a long-form feature, inspired by Tom Francis’ epic retelling of his adventures in Galactic Civilizations 2.

I’m yet to upgrade from Football Manager 2022, since FM23 seems to be lacking in new features, but for the purposes of this article, that really doesn’t matter. You see, a week or so ago, when I was wondering who to play as in a new FM save, I realised that there was only one rational choice: Wrexham A.F.C.. This might not seem like the obvious choice: I’m not from Wrexham, have never seen them play, nor do I have any attachment to the place. What Wrexham does have is money and motivated owners. Back in 2021, Hollywood’s own Ryan Reynolds and Paddy’s Pub’s own Rob McElhenney bought the club. McElhenney had learned to love football after watching the documentary Sunderland ’Til I Die, which follows the triumphs and tumults of the North East’s sleeping giants.

As an article in FourFourTwo points out, Wrexham had been through a lot at this point. While never giants on the scale of Sunderland, Wrexham were once a solid lower league team in the English football league (Wrexham is a Welsh club, but plays in the English league), with their peak coming in the shape of a brief spell in the second tier. The club’s nadir came in 2011 when the club was nearly expelled from the football league. Fans rallied and raised a massive £127,000 in one day to secure their club’s fixtures for the season. This is a level of dedication matched only by Union Berlin, a team that supporters helped save by literally bleeding for their club, donating blood and using the money earned to donate to the Eiserne. As such, the takeover by a pair of A-list celebrities caused massive excitement in North Wales.

Yet who should lead this club back to footballing glory and celebratory beers? There’s only one choice: Bootlegger, AKA Karl Phillips. To fans across the UK, Bootlegger is a Wrexham A.F.C. icon. His matchday vlogs, a genre of video that is normally impressively dull, are sensational, full of drama and demonstrate lower-league footballing culture at its funniest and most visceral. The stage was set: Bootlegger, in the FM-universe now a former regional footballer turned manager, was ready to take the club he loves to dizzy new heights. As the man himself would say, ‘my spidey-senses tell me this is gonna get fucking tasty, baby’.

Red Dragons Ascendent: The National League

As in real life, we start in the National League. This is the frontier. The final league in English football that spans the whole country. Below this, we have the National League North and South, which are regional. Below us lies nothing but the ignominy of semi-professional football and a total loss of national relevance. Thankfully, our A-list owners have given Wrexham a transfer budget of £250,000, a princely sum for this level of football, essentially giving us a massive war chest in a league that’s famed for its impoverished teams. We’ve also got some fantastic new signings on our side before any of my transfer business starts. Most notably, we have Ollie Palmer, a tremendous former Wimbledon striker and his counterpart, the peanut butter to his jam, Paul Mullin, forward and striker from Cambridge United.

The transfer business starts thick and fast. Layton Ndukwu, a product of the Leicester academy, comes in on a free to boost our wings, Danny Rose (not that one), comes in to partner with Palmer, and veteran defensive midfielder Michael Mancienne, formerly of Nottingham Forest, QPR, and Wolves, among others, is cast as Wrexham’s linchpin. We also managed to get some high-level young talent thanks to loans, including Rodel Richards, formerly of the Spurs academy. Richards is something of a recurring character in my FM saves, turning up whenever I manage a non-league team, sometimes blossoming into a beautiful Premier League-quality butterfly, sometimes not, but always being dependable.

After a handful of friendlies, including one against Paris Saint-Germain 2, whom I somehow coaxed to the Racecourse Ground (I lost, by the way), the season begins in earnest. Our very first league game is against Yeovil Town, another team that’s fallen from grace in recent years, and, more notably for me, my late dad’s beloved team. Well, sorry dad, but I’m here to do a job: Wrexham handily see off Yeovil 2-0 at the Racecourse, sending a whole 157 Yeovil fans on a long drive back down the M5 in a gloomy mood. This strong start continues for over a month. We win a whole seven games back to back, claiming scalp after scalp. Then we meet Stockport. Despite a strong start from Layton Ndukwu, who scored in the 33rd minute, we get pegged back in the 46th before conceding what would turn out to be the winner just six minutes later. This first defeat sends shockwaves through the squad’s morale, and while we taste victory against Aldershot in the next game, this is followed by two hard defeats against Chesterfield and Barnet, both of these coming on home turf to add insult to injury.

This crisis of morale doesn’t last too long, thankfully, and by Christmas, we’re secure in first place. There is another threat rising, though: Notts County. The Magpies are on a tear of their own and are our only threat to becoming champions. We saw them off in the third game of the season but since then they’ve been winning game after game thanks to some incredibly valuable players that they managed to hang onto since their fall from the big leagues of League 2. Over the course of the season, we would fight over first and second place like a pair of cloned Usain Bolts, absolutely dominating the league, leaving third-place Solihull Moors in our dust. Our games with Notts County were tough: we won the first before losing the second 0-1 in a disappointing collapse at Meadow Lane, home to some of the worst toilets I’ve ever seen in a football stadium.

At the end of the season, we were even with a frankly unbelievable 102 points each (for reference, in this season in real life, Stockport won with 94 points, six points clear of second place, uh, Wrexham). If you’re unfamiliar with football, you might not be aware of the knife fight that is the National League. While the higher leagues have three or four promotion places, the National League has two. Only one of these is automatic, with the other place going to the winner of a six-team playoff. If you’re not first, your chances of going up go down quite dramatically. The one thing we had going for us was our absurd goal difference, and it was this that won us the league. Over the course of the season, we scored 96 goals and conceded just 30, giving us a goal difference of 66. Notts County could only muster a goal difference of 45. We had it in the bag. If you wanted to witness tragedy in football that year, you needed to follow Notts County. After a stellar season and a convincing 4-0 playoff semi-final victory against Aldershot, it all came undone at Wembley. In this storied stadium, 21,354 Notts County fans witnessed a shock 4-0 defeat against Grimsby, who had finished in fourth place with a modest 84 points.

Not only had we won the league, but we’d also won a double! Despite not making it very far in the FA Cup, we emerged victorious in our own Wembley away day to claim the FA Trophy, its non-league equivalent. What a final, too, a dominant 5-0 win against Aldershot, with goals from Palmer and Richards. We had a lot to celebrate, but now the real task was upon us. We’d taken our very first step and things were about to get a whole lot tougher.