Football has produced fairytales before. Clubs rise from obscurity. Underdogs win titles. Communities rally around a badge. But what Wrexham AFC has done between 2023 and 2025 doesn’t fit neatly into any existing fairytale template because it’s never been done before.
Three promotions. Three consecutive seasons. From the fifth tier of English football all the way to the Championship, the second tier, where Premier League dreams genuinely exist. No club in the top five divisions of English football has ever climbed that far, that fast. What makes Wrexham’s story so compelling isn’t just the results, it’s everything that surrounded them.
The Starting Point: A Club Left Behind
Before Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney arrived in 2020, Wrexham was a club defined more by its struggles than its history. Founded in 1864, it’s one of the oldest football clubs in the world and the oldest in Wales. But by the time the Hollywood duo completed their takeover, Wrexham had been playing in the National League, the fifth tier, outside the Football League entirely since 2008.
More than a decade of non-league football had worn the club down. The fanbase remained loyal, the stadium still held stories worth telling, but the football itself had drifted far from where it once belonged.
The new owners changed that. Not overnight, and not without difficulty. But with genuine investment, a credible managerial appointment in Phil Parkinson, and the extraordinary global platform provided by the Welcome to Wrexham documentary series, the club was transformed into something new, a local club with worldwide attention and the resources to match its ambition.
Year One: Back in the Football League
The 2022–23 season was the first real test of whether the new era meant anything on the pitch. Wrexham won the National League title and secured promotion to EFL League Two the fourth tier ending a 15-year exile from the Football League.
It sounds straightforward in retrospect. It wasn’t. The National League is competitive, unforgiving, and full of clubs with their own ambitions. Winning it as champions, rather than scraping through via the playoffs, sent a clear message: this wasn’t a project built on hope alone.
Returning to the Football League after 15 years was a genuine emotional moment for supporters who had waited through a long, difficult chapter. It was also the foundation on which everything else was built.
Year Two: Back-to-Back
Maintaining promotion momentum is harder than achieving it. Some clubs win one division and immediately struggle in the next, finding the step up too steep, the opposition too organised, the schedule too relentless.
Wrexham didn’t struggle. In 2023–24, playing in League Two for the first time in over a decade, they finished second and earned promotion to League One the third tier. Back-to-back promotions in back-to-back seasons.
Phil Parkinson’s management deserves significant credit here. Known throughout his career for engineering promotions with limited resources, he brought tactical discipline and a squad culture that translated well as the level of opposition rose. Players brought in specifically for the project proved they could perform across multiple tiers, which is not as common as it might sound.
Globally, the Welcome to Wrexham documentary was drawing millions of viewers to a club that most of them had never heard of a year earlier. The attention translated into commercial revenue, merchandise sales, and an international fanbase that gave the club financial breathing room that most League Two sides could only imagine.
Year Three: The Championship
The 2024–25 season was the most significant of the three. League One is a proper, competitive division full of former Premier League clubs, experienced managers, and squads built with serious investment. Getting out of it in a single season is difficult for anyone.
Wrexham did it. They finished second, secured Wrexham’s promotion to the EFL Championship, and made it three consecutive seasons with three consecutive steps up. The decisive moment came in a 3–0 win over Charlton Athletic, a statement result that confirmed the achievement in style.
The Championship represents a return to a level the club hasn’t seen since the 1981–82 season. More than 40 years. Supporters who grew up watching Wrexham in the lower tiers have been able to see their club compete against the likes of clubs fighting for Premier League places.
What Makes This Historically Unprecedented
The word “unprecedented” gets overused in sport. Here, it applies precisely.
No club in the history of the top five divisions of English football has achieved three consecutive promotions across those tiers in three consecutive seasons. The combination of speed and scale of the rise is genuinely unique.
To put it in simple terms: in 2022, Wrexham were non-league. Three years later, they were competing in a division one step below the Premier League. The club’s valuation, which was modest at the point of the Reynolds and McElhenney takeover, has grown to an estimated £150 million a number that reflects not just the football success but the global brand that has been built around it.
The Championship and What Comes Next
In the 2025–26 season, Wrexham competed in the Championship for the first time in over four decades. The division is significantly more demanding, deeper squads, higher wages, tighter margins. At various points in the season, the club has even featured in playoff positions, which would mean a fourth promotion in four years and a place in the Premier League.
Whether that happens or not, the story is already complete enough to stand alone. Three promotions in three years, a club transformed from non-league obscurity to national conversation, and a model that other lower-league owners will study for years.
Why the Story Resonates Beyond Football
Part of what makes Wrexham different is that the story was being told in real time, to a global audience, through a documentary that humanised everyone involved: the players, the fans, the town, the owners.
Reynolds and McElhenney weren’t absentee celebrities cutting a ribbon. They showed up, learned the game, cried at results, and built genuine connections with a community that had been waiting a long time for someone to care as much as they did.
That combination of genuine sporting achievement wrapped in compelling storytelling is what elevated a North Wales football club into a genuine international phenomenon.
Conclusion
Wrexham’s rise from the fifth tier to the Championship in three consecutive seasons is, without qualification, one of the most remarkable stories in English football history. It required investment, smart management, exceptional squad depth, and a kind of collective belief that’s hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.
The football fairytale is real. The results are in the record books. And for a club that spent 15 years outside the Football League entirely, competing in a division one promotion from the Premier League feels less like fantasy and more like the natural next chapter of a story that’s still being written.
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