What does a good football club look like?
AFC Wimbledon, the paragon of fan ownership, visit Welsh Hollywood
Built to last
Football clubs have that same divine quality you often find in places of worship. Step inside a stadium - any at all - and you’ll see it. You’ll feel it. Footy clubs are spaces for the believers, the devoted, and the faithful. It’s not uncommon to see fans, or even players, describe a ground as their “church”. And since the formation of these institutions, communities have sprouted and wrapped around them, enveloping them like climbing plants.
Built by our hard-nosed Victorian ancestors, football clubs were glued together by memberships which have since been passed down through five or six generations, weathering more than a century of storms and wars and riots and pandemics that have ravaged the country in the background. They were here long before us and they will stand long after we’re gone. Aged 160, Wrexham is one of the oldest of them all.
But the truth is that football clubs aren’t future proof in the slightest. They die all the time. And for every year one owner celebrates an anniversary, there’s another out there somewhere handing over the keys to a liquidator.
Football clubs are more brittle and vulnerable than we care to admit, with many factors capable of bringing them to their knees. Sometimes, the numbers on the balance sheet simply don’t add up. Occasionally, the guys in charge are totally unfit for the job. In certain instances, there just isn’t enough fan interest. Often, it’s a combination of all the above.
We needn’t look more than 13 miles down the road for a fitting example of what can go wrong. Wrexham and Chester didn’t need another thing to fight over: We already had Wales vs England, Red vs Blue, and Blue Collar vs White Collar etc. But since Chester City went bump, Stubbornness vs Acceptance has also been thrown into the mix.
After tirelessly scrapping tooth and nail to ventilate the toxic gas filling up our club cockpit in the mid-noughties, before rapidly patching up our engine and pulling the Red plane out of its tailspin into what looked like certain oblivion, Chester supporters faced a similar scenario but chose to leap out of their own burning plane with parachutes, turning their back on their old vehicle-for-civic-pride as it burst into flames whilst they rebuilt a facsimile on the original runway. We repeatedly tease Chester that they could have saved their club if they really wanted to.
Their retort - at least now - is that they are fan-owned and have retained their real DNA, whilst we have sold out for Hollywood.
To play Devil’s Advocate and stand in that opposing blue corner, just for a moment, it could be argued that we are just the latest in a long line of clubs who have greedily signed over our deeds at the promise of buckets of cash: Wrexham AFC isn’t really ours anymore and we will regret it later. When you take a look around the lovely old town and see it in the midst of booming regeneration as a direct result of our international exposure from the Hollywood takeover, that argument is exposed as being the myopic quip that it is. But it is a debate that will continue nonetheless.
In an excellent editorial titled “Football clubs were born to represent communities and fans, not owners”, writer Jonathan Wilson stated that whilst clubs are “ciphers for often profound feelings of belonging and identity”, the problem with modern football is that “everything is to be bought and sold.”
In the early nineties, TV money flipped the log on football and sent business cockroaches scurrying out to purchase stadiums that would make themselves even richer, so the notion of fans reclaiming their clubs became a popular one. Nowadays, a school of thought has developed: You can either sell and potentially succeed in the short-term until the owner decides to keep the lion’s share of the profits for themselves, or you can keep it in the family and climb the leagues slowly, together with your mates, who you trust.
You can be a commodity or a community. Those are your options.
The reason the Hollywood model has made so many column inches in the football media is not just because of its famous figureheads, but because it asks: Can’t you be both?
As RR McReynolds pump cash into a club intrinsically connected to a wider town and all parties reap the rewards, they have created a good case thus far that clubs can have good-hearted custodians outside of the fanbase and still turbocharge success.
But is it worth it? Those who bawled their eyes out on the pitch after that Boreham Wood game would say: Oh, yes it is. Those who were stuck on terraces at Guiseley and Dover for years and can no longer get a ticket for love nor money would say: Maybe not.
The jury is out. Depends who you talk to. But there is no better time to examine what constitutes good football ownership than when AFC Wimbledon are in town.
The Wombles may have suffered a similar fate to our enemies across the border, but most Reds won’t use that same hurtful stick to beat them with. Largely because their circumstances were much different. Several people tried to take Wimbledon out of their own neighbourhood, and whilst plans to relocate the club to Dublin ultimately failed, one man did unfortunately succeed in moving them to Milton Keynes - which is when most supporters decided to start again from scratch.
They are widely respected in football as a result. Wimbledon have clawed their way up to equal footing with their nemesis franchise MK Dons - who have embraced their status as the pantomime villains - and will arrive in Wales on Saturday with an inevitably large army to watch the club they reassembled with their bare hands go up against a team with a newly transatlantic fanbase. We shared the spoils last time we met - our first point in the Football League for 15 years.
It will be interesting to see what AFC Wimbledon make of us. Wombles fans will know we share their sense of chutzpah, having saved our own club from the brink. And for that we might earn a nod or handshake of respect. But will they understand our decision to take the lottery ticket?
You never know what you’ll say until someone dangles that carrot in front of you, I suppose. But with back-to-back promotions a real possibility and a deafening buzz of excitement across LL on every matchday that has seen crowds swell and driftaway fans returning to Y Cae Ras, right now it seems like we made a good call.
What AFC Wimbledon have done is remarkable. The Premier League is yet to welcome a fan-owned club, but hopefully that will change one day. We did the fan model for many years and it was essential at the time - although we hit a very firm ceiling in the pits of non-league.
It was time for a change and our new route has proven prosperous so far. And when you see all the kids bouncing down the high street in Red shirts rather than sitting at home watching Man Utd on the iPad, you can see football is still in the family in Wrexham.
Is our model built to last? Only time will tell. RR McReynolds won’t be here in another 50 years, but our children and grandchildren will. And we’ll have the greatest stories to share with them from this chapter at least, along with proud history and achievements they can stand upon.
Y Cae Ras isn’t the same humble church it was all those years ago. It’s more Vatican City now than St Mary’s on Regent Street. But it still feels like a holy place with the soul intact. Just a little bigger and shinier on the outside.