Well done Wrexham on promotion to League Two from the National League.
Promotion is great. I know.
What’s less good is the weird wall-to-wall media coverage of your promotion. Because, let’s face it, while it’s big for you – you can only beat who is put in front of you – I’m no way belittling it when I say that it’s not actually that big a deal for the rest of the world.
Stockport County and Sutton United didn’t have the national broadcaster sharing live images of their promotion parades when they achieved similar feats in recent years. But then they didn’t have a genial, Hollywood film star as their co-owner, did they? And that’s the difficult bit for Wrexham fans to accept: it’s really not about their rather mediocre team. No-one actually cares about the football. It’s all about Ryan Reynolds.
And I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, and the work he’s done at money he’s put into the club is amazing. But they’ve won the National League, not the Champions League. One wonders how far down the fawning media would be prepared to go, had he taken over an even lower league club. Would we still have cameras there for each and every game if he’d plumped for Walton and Hersham in the Isthmian League Division One South Central, for example?
Sadly, probably.
I thought that I was alone in feeling this way about Wrexham. I thought that maybe I was seeing more about them because we have recent history when we knocked them out of the FA Cup earlier this year in those rather bad tempered fourth round games. Maybe Google looked at all the Wrexham references on the Sheffield United pages that I was reading and thought I needed to see more. (I really didn’t.)
But apparently, not:
And it seems that they feel the same way that I do about all this:
There are some quotes on the link above from people who feel differently, but they’re from Wrexham fans, (one of whom even uses the word “bandwagon”), and who wouldn’t want to enjoy seeing pictures all over the press of their team celebrating?
I don’t think that English football (yes, I know they’re Welsh, but…) needs that sort of celebrity nonsense. Save it for the MLS and the Saudi Leagues. And make our football leagues all about the football rather than the non-footballing personalities in the backroom.
I do understand that this isn’t going away any time soon, although I obviously wish it would.
But if you – like me – thought that you were the only person feeling this way about the inordinate number of undeserved column inches and TV news pixels being devoted to Wrexham Ryan, well, you’re really not.
