Have you signed the online petition to support the campaign for the Stadium for the North?
If you haven’t, make sure you do it now. You can finish reading this later: I’ll wait.
Have we all done it now? Good, because by getting the funding for this project, we’re making a huge step forwards, both as a football club and a region.
There is no guarantee that the levelling-up funding which will underpin this project will be forthcoming. Indeed, it’ll be a heavily-contested dog-fight to get the green light from the government. Every individual act of support matters enormously.
North Wales has been neglected in so many ways for far too long. The momentum is shifting now though, and a resurgence has begun. Getting the support we need to convert The Racecourse into a stadium fit for international sport, and in doing so providing the region with a high quality venue for events, would be a crucial tipping point.
North Wales in general, and Wrexham in particular, is the cradle of Welsh football. In the Nineteenth Century teams like Wrexham, Druids and Newtown were among the pioneers of the organised game. Chirk versus Middlesbrough wasn’t a mismatch in those days, but a genuinely competitive fixture.
Wrexham was at the heart of all that. Wales’ first international was played on Acton Park, and The Racecourse quickly took over as the regular home of the national team. The greats all trod its turf, from Meredith through Allchurch and Charles to Rush and Bale.
The stadium’s demise in popularity with the F.A.W. stems from a number of factors. Crucially, our southern neighbours started to realise that their own favoured pastime, with that ludicrous egg-shaped ball, wasn’t the only game in town. Bigger capacities, large catchment areas and a Welsh F.A. which transferred itself south for the committee’s convenience all played in Cardiff’s favour.
But a crucial factor in the failure of Wrexham to re-emerge as a venue is the mistreatment the club has suffered. The decline we have gone through this century, due to loss of assets, mismanagement and worse, is a tragedy.
It left us with a derelict Kop and a decayed stadium with an inadequate infrastructure. Drastic action has been required for a while.
Obviously, the new owners at the club have already done a lot to address these short-comings, but their largesse brings with it a natural misconception. It’s understandable that people ask why they can’t put their hands in their pockets and build a Kop themselves.
The answer is one of the main reasons why their leadership of the club excites me, but I accept it’s an explanation that many would need to ponder before accepting.
They have certainly been generous in their support of the club, but their stated aim is to grow Wrexham AFC into something naturally much bigger than it was a year ago.
That means not constantly coughing up more and more cash to cover new and exotic expenses. Instead, their investment is designed to grow the key areas of the club, so we will get to a point where we naturally fit into the upper reaches of the Football League.
That’s why what they’re suggesting is sustainable. If a rich owner stuffs a club full of money, it will surely enjoy good times. When the owner stops doing so, the club will go pop. Take a look at what could have happened to Chelsea for proof of that.
So McElhenney and Reynolds are totally entitled to seek funding for the project, because that’s what all football clubs do. You don’t think that Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid and the likes don’t seek out municipal and governmental funding do you? Of course they do. Running a football club is running a business, not donating to charity.
So we need this project to get funding. We need a brand-new 5,500 capacity Kop, which would allow Wales to host competitive internationals at the ground.
We also need that 50% increase in our capacity because we’ve developed the rather pleasing habit of selling out The Racecourse in recent months! Like I said, the club is being grown organically, and this is the crucial next step.
That explosion in attendance figures tells us something important. North Wales’ ambitions have often been dismissed with the argument that there are plenty of leisure facilities to the north. If we want to watch sport, see a band or catch a shop, pop across to Liverpool or Manchester.
Well, the spurt in Wrexham attendances tells you something different. We’d rather have good facilities and exciting events on our doorstep, thank you very much. If you build it, they will come.
It’s not just sport which will benefit. The area will be rejuvenates, with a 400 space multi-storey car park and a convention centre and hotel. We’ve just been made a city: let’s make sure we live up to that billing.
Please get behind this campaign and give it a final push before our case is considered by the government. I assume you all took me seriously at the start of this column and signed the petition: that’s the crucial first step. But don’t stop there. Share the petition on social media. Tell people why it’s important. Wear your pride in Wrexham, in North Wales, on your sleeve and get people excited about the positive future we are approaching together.
DragonHeart 