Underdog Stories / Football history

How Was Wrexham AFC Saved by Its Fans?

How was Wrexham AFC saved by its fans? A £127,000 rescue kept the club playing in 2011; years of fan ownership gave it a future before Hollywood arrived.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · October 23, 2026

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In August 2011, a 10-year-old brought £35 he had saved to the Racecourse Ground. Chris Horwedel opens the Why We Love This Club episode “Wrexham AFC — Saved by the Town, Lifted by Hollywood” with that child and a deadline.

How was Wrexham AFC saved by its fans? Facing a demand for financial security before the season began, supporters raised £127,000 in a day. They then took ownership through the Wrexham Supporters Trust, ran a club in deep trouble for nine years, and voted to sell it to Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds in 2020. The stars could build on a club that was still there.

Why did Wrexham AFC need its fans to save it?

The immediate problem was a bond: money the Football Conference wanted as proof that Wrexham could finish the 2011–12 season. Horwedel says the club needed £250,000. Owner Geoff Moss had put up £150,000, leaving a £100,000 gap with the deadline almost upon them.

Then people came to the Racecourse. Horwedel describes two men offering property deeds to back a loan. He says a supporter in Canada sent £10,000. There was the child with £35, too. These were sums from different kinds of lives, offered because the same fixture list mattered to them.

By the end of the day, supporters had raised £127,000. On August 10, the Football Supporters’ Federation reported that the Conference had cleared Wrexham to compete. The money had solved Tuesday’s problem. It could not settle who would run the club in November, or where it would play in the years after that.

That distinction matters. A rescue appeal can keep the gates open. Wrexham’s fans still had to face the much slower work behind those gates.

Why did the Racecourse Ground matter so much?

The club began beside it. In October 1864, members of Wrexham Cricket Club met at The Turf, the pub next to the ground, seeking a winter sport. Their new football team played its first match against the Prince of Wales Fire Brigade on October 22. It lost by 2 goals to 1.

Horwedel briefly gives the founding year as 1964 before placing the story in 1864 later in the episode. 1864 is the year. The slip is easy to forgive in a tale that passes through a pub, a cricket club and a fire brigade before reaching its first result.

The Racecourse gave that young club a place people could return to. Wales played its first home international there in 1877. Wrexham won the first Welsh Cup the following year, though the final had to be played at Acton Park because the Racecourse was unavailable.

It became a place for huge crowds and unlikely wins. Horwedel recalls the club-record 34,445 who came to see Manchester United in the FA Cup in 1957. In January 1992, Wrexham beat reigning English champions Arsenal there, with Mickey Thomas’s free kick followed by Steve Watkin’s winner.

A stadium holds memories. It can also be sold. By the early 2000s, supporters had reason to worry that the ground beneath all those matches might be worth more to someone else than the football played on it.

What happened to Wrexham before the 2011 rescue?

The danger grew from a fight over club property. Evidence submitted to a UK parliamentary inquiry described a 2002 agreement between Alex Hamilton and Mark Guterman to profit personally from Wrexham’s assets. Control of the Racecourse became central to the dispute.

Wrexham entered administration on December 4, 2004, to avoid being wound up over its debts. The club lost ten league points. Horwedel notes one of the crueller turns: the team won the 2005 Football League Trophy, yet was relegated from League One that season. Without the points penalty, it would have stayed up.

Supporters were working through the crisis. Research published by Supporters Direct says the trust ran the club’s commercial operations during its 18 months in administration. Fans kept raising money after local businessmen bought the club and ground in 2006.

The 87-year stay ended in 2008, when the team fell out of the Football League. Then came the sale. In 2011, the ground and training facilities went to the local university, though Wrexham could still play at the Racecourse, which the club no longer owned.

“Keeping a club alive and getting it promoted turned out to be very different jobs.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

So the bond appeal was no freak emergency. Supporters had spent years watching the finances and the ground change hands. When they turned up with money that August, many already knew a single good day would not fix the club.

What did the Wrexham Supporters Trust do?

The trust took control in November 2011. It inherited a club losing more than £1 million a year, according to the Football Supporters’ Association’s account of the fan-ownership years. The Racecourse and training ground had gone from the club’s assets.

Volunteers worked alongside paid staff. Supporters supplied funds and helped make choices that would outlast a season. By 2018, the trust had secured a 99-year lease giving it effective control of the Racecourse. Board member Spencer Harris said fans had invested £1 million over six years. Average crowds had risen above 4,700.

None of that made the football easy. Wrexham took 98 league points in the 2011 to 2012 season and still missed automatic promotion. In 2013, the team won the FA Trophy at Wembley, then returned five weeks later and lost the promotion playoff final to Newport County.

Horwedel puts the hard part plainly: “Keeping a club alive and getting it promoted turned out to be very different jobs.” The trust did the first. It did not manage the second, and said so when the sale was completed in 2021.

Its record is worth judging on those terms. The club was still playing, its finances had improved, and its supporters had a say in what happened next. Promotion remained stubbornly out of reach.

Did Wrexham fans approve the Hollywood takeover?

Yes. Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds offered to buy Wrexham and invest £2 million. The people they had to persuade were the trust members who owned the club.

The pair presented their plans at a virtual meeting on November 8, 2020. Members could ask questions, then cast their ballots online or by post. The vote closed on November 15. Mi-Voice, which ran it, reported that 98.6% voted in favor; 26 opposed the deal and nine abstained.

That vote changed the familiar Hollywood story. The vote mattered. Reynolds and McElhenney bought a club its supporters had kept going, then asked those same supporters for permission to take charge. They had not found an empty club and filled it with people.

The sale was completed on February 9, 2021. In its statement that day, the trust thanked its volunteers and acknowledged that it had failed to return Wrexham to the Football League. It had also left the new owners a club with growing crowds and a protected stake in its home ground.

What changed after fan ownership ended?

Money and attention changed what Wrexham could attempt on the field. Under manager Phil Parkinson, the club signed Paul Mullin in 2021, then added players including Ben Tozer and Ollie Palmer. Promotion still took time. Wrexham lost a playoff to Grimsby Town in 2022.

The breakthrough came in April 2023. Wrexham beat Boreham Wood by 3 goals to 1 at the Racecourse. After 15 years away, the club returned to the Football League. The side finished on 111 points. Promotions followed in 2024 and 2025, taking the men into the Championship. The English Football League called it the first run of three straight promotions across the top five levels.

The women’s team made its own mark at the ground. Then came March 2026. Wrexham beat Cardiff City 4 to 1 there to win its first Adran Premier title, with Katie Barker scoring a hat-trick in front of 2,918 spectators.

The old question about the Racecourse has an answer as well. In July 2026, the club and trust ended their stadium leases and put legal protections in place for football there until 2115. Wrexham paid the trust £187,000, matching what fans had contributed through 2011 loan notes and community shares. That is a wider figure than the £127,000 raised on the bond day.

In September 2026, Wrexham’s ownership group bought The Turf. The pub beside the ground had hosted the meeting that started the club in 1864. Its owners now have a football club, a stadium and, rather wonderfully, the pub where someone first thought they should have a football team.

The full episode of Why We Love This Club is on Underdog Podcasts, with the rest of the network's shows.