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Can Wrexham sustain its success?

Humphrey Ker, speaking on the eve of the release of the third season of Welcome to Wrexham, is candidly discussing the day when the Emmy award-winning docuseries will come to an end.

“At some stage the documentary will go away,” Ker, the club’s executive director and star of the hit Disney+ series, admits to The Times. “That’s inevitable. It may not be next year — in fact, it won’t be next year — and it may not be the year after that, or the year after that. But at some stage, I think, there won’t be a season 12 of Welcome to Wrexham. And we will need to be able to stand on our own two feet when it comes.

“We will need to retain the fans we have now because we have this extraordinary global fanbase and we want them to be as engaged when we are battling away at the top end of the Championship or the lower half of the Premier League without the documentary to create the ‘soap opera’ around it, which is a big part of what people love.”

What we’re generating now is extraordinary. The volume of visitors we’re drawing to Wrexham is staggering. “If those people are willing to fly from Australia, Canada, America, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Italy, Slovakia — these are people I’ve met in the club car park in the last two weeks — you hope that level of commitment suggests a lifelong buy-in to the football club. But we’ll see.”

There certainly does not appear to be any end in sight for a series that has catapulted the club’s revenue towards £20million a year and catalysed consecutive promotions to League One, three years after the Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and fellow actor and writer McElhenney bought the club.

The club receives no money directly from the documentary. Instead, the benefits come from the exposure provided by the show, which has yielded sponsorships with global businesses such as United Airlines, SToK Coffee Brew and HP. Google recently proclaimed Wrexham to be more popular in the United States than every team in its domestic top flight, Major League Soccer (MLS), other than Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami.

There is plenty of mileage left in Welcome to Wrexham, then, but could the club’s progression accelerate too fast? “There’s much debate within our fanbase at the moment,” Ker says. “We will go all out to achieve what we can achieve. But if we end up in tenth or 12th, I won’t be rending my shirt and tearing my hair out, because that will allow us a season of consolidation in League One.

“We need to make sure that what we’re doing is sustainable. We need the infrastructure of the club to catch up with the first team.”

Is there a touch of hubris to Wrexham, or is it a story of revival in a city that has faced its share of challenges?   The supporters kept the club going for many years against the odds and they deserve some time in the sunshine. - just as long as they don't fly too close to the sun.

 

 

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