WREXHAM, Wales (AP) — There will be no trips to Old Trafford or Anfield. No visits from Erling Haaland or Bukayo Saka.
For Wrexham and its growing fanbase across the world, the dream of playing in the Premier League next season — of back-to-back-to-back-to back promotions — is over.
And the sense of disappointment was acute inside the Racecourse Ground on Saturday following the 2-2 draw with Middlesbrough that dropped Wrexham out of the playoff places
on the final day of the Championship season. The players slumped to the ground, clearly disconsolate. One covered his face with his hands.
Yet, there was pride, too, among supporters who serenaded the team with a standing ovation. Many of them will have been there 20 years ago, when Wrexham was on the brink of financial ruin — a hostage to the actions of an unscrupulous owner — before clubbing together to save it from going out of business.
Now, Wrexham has just recorded the highest ever finish in its 162-year history — seventh place in English soccer’s second tier — and the club's ambitions remain high under celebrity owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac.
“The standard has been set now,” Wrexham defender Dom Hyam said. “And we want to go one better next season.”
Indeed, when the rawness of missing out on promotion fades, some fans might even think it is a blessing in disguise to be staying in the Championship.
“I still think we still need a couple of seasons in this league,” David Morris, a longtime Wrexham fan, told The Associated Press at a game at the Racecourse last month.
“I think we’ve been going too fast, too quick.”
Here’s a look at what the immediate future holds for the once-down-on-its luck Welsh club that has, from out of nowhere, become one of the world’s most talked-about soccer teams.
Go to the Racecourse — or STōK Cae Ras, to use the Welsh name the club prefers — and you’ll be immediately struck by the sight of cranes and diggers and giant concrete blocks in a construction site behind one of the goals in the stadium.
Redevelopment work of the Kop stand — a promise that was on the mission statement of Reynolds and Mac when they bought the club in 2021 — started in 2025 and is due to be completed in early 2027, providing an additional 7,500 fans, according to team officials.
That will lift the capacity to up to 18,000 seats, restore the Racecourse to being four-sided, and mean the stadium complies to a UEFA category that enables the hosting of international matches.
“The Kop is a big thing,” Morris said. “I mean, you can’t go to the Premier League and only be having 10,000 fans (for home games) because it’s just not right.
“We’re going to have to spend a lot more money on players and we need the fans there to help generate the money as well.”
“Welcome to Wrexham” — the Emmy Award-winning TV series documenting Reynolds' and Mac's first foray into soccer ownership — has been a key driver behind the club’s soaring profile. There have already been four series of the show.
Season 5 begins this month and Reynolds announced on Instagram that it has been renewed for three more.
Geir Ludvig Maeland, a 49-year-old from the Norwegian town Haugesund, attended Wrexham’s match against Stoke last month with friends and said the TV show was the reason he’d been attracted to the club and its journey up the leagues.
“Very nice people, very charming and welcoming,” was the summary of first experience of Wrexham after having a drink in The Turf pub that adjoins the Racecourse.
Maeland also said Wrexham would benefit from another year in the Championship.
“If they go up the Premier League, they’ll go straight down again,” he said. “They need more experience.”
Wrexham's unprecedented run of three straight promotions, which took the team out of the fifth-tier National League and into the Championship, has been overseen by manager Phil Parkinson.
Doubts over whether Parkinson, who has never coached a Premier League club, could take Wrexham any further have been dispelled by the team's record high finish.
Mac recently said Parkinson has “got the job for life.”
“Ryan and I talk all the time,” he said in an interview with The Athletic, “and I just don’t see a scenario where Phil Parkinson gets fired. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Wrexham spent around $40 million on 13 new signings last summer, an outlay that was the biggest so far in one transfer window under Reynolds and Mac and no doubt boosted by the club getting outside financial investment via the New York-based Allyn family and private equity firm Apollo Sports Capital over the last two years.
Expect Wrexham to spend big again, with Morris calling for a center back, two midfielders and a striker who can “do it himself instead of being fed.”
Speaking after the Middlesbrough game, Parkinson left no doubt there will be more incomings over the summer.
“We know where we’d like to strengthen and what we need to improve on,” he said. “We’ll do that and we’ll make this squad as strong as we possibly can to mount a challenge next year.”
It's a league that is notoriously hard to get out of — some might say the hardest, with so many clubs desperate for a slice of the Premier League's riches — and it might yet contain one of England's biggest teams next season if Tottenham fails to avoid relegation.
The Championship is sure to include another ambitious, American-owned club in Birmingham City, while Wolverhampton and Burnley — whose relegation from the top flight has already been confirmed — will be helped by tens of millions of dollars in parachute payments provided by the Premier League, covering the next three seasons.
A change for next season's Championship — improving Wrexham's chances of promotion — is the addition of two extra playoff berths, down to eighth place.
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