The Hollywood-owned Welsh club that turned a small football town into a global brand is coming to New Zealand, and the Wellington Phoenix will be the side lining up against it. Wrexham AFC will play the Phoenix at Sky Stadium on Saturday 19 July, with kick-off set for 5pm, in the New Zealand leg of the club’s first pre-season tour of this part of the world.
The fixture is the final stop on what Wrexham have called their Wrexham Down Under tour. The Welsh side open in Australia against Melbourne Victory at Marvel Stadium on Friday 11 July, then face Sydney FC at Allianz Stadium on Tuesday 15 July, before crossing the Tasman to finish against the Phoenix in the capital. For a New Zealand club that missed the A-League finals last season, hosting one of the most talked-about names in world football is a rare drawcard.
Most of that attention has nothing to do with silverware. Wrexham were bought in 2021 by the Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and the pair have since turned the club into the subject of the Emmy award-winning documentary series Welcome to Wrexham. The show has followed the team’s rise from the fifth tier of English football, tracking the players, the staff and the north Wales town alongside them. In a statement released with the tour announcement, Reynolds and McElhenney said they had wanted from the outset to help make Wrexham a globally recognised team, town and brand, and a trip to the other side of the world is about as far as that reach now stretches.
The football behind the celebrity has been serious. Wrexham, founded in 1864, are the oldest club in Wales and one of the oldest professional clubs anywhere in the game. Under Reynolds and McElhenney they climbed out of the National League and then won three successive promotions to reach the Championship, the second tier of English football, for the first time since the early 1980s. Last season they came close to going up again. Wrexham finished seventh in the Championship, the highest placing in the club’s history, and ended just two points short of the play-off places that would have given them a shot at the Premier League.
That means the group arriving in Wellington will be a genuine second-division English side preparing for another promotion push, not a collection of veterans on an exhibition trip. Pre-season friendlies are usually about fitness and minutes rather than results, but the standard of opposition still gives the Phoenix a useful benchmark and gives Wellington football fans a chance to see a team they have mostly only watched on screen.
For the Phoenix, the match is as much an event as a contest. The club’s general manager David Dome said the capital had a proud history of hosting New Zealand’s biggest football events and that the game promised to be another unmissable night at Sky Stadium. Wellington has form here. The stadium has staged All Whites qualifiers and A-League finals football, and a visiting club with Wrexham’s profile is the kind of booking that tends to fill seats well beyond the usual football crowd.
The Phoenix will want to put on a show for a reason beyond the occasion. Wellington finished eighth in the A-League last season, out of the top six and short of the finals, and the club is rebuilding for the next campaign. A strong performance against a promotion-chasing English side would be a welcome marker heading into pre-season proper, and a soft one in front of a big crowd would sting more than most friendlies do.
The timing lands the game in the middle of a busy stretch for New Zealand football. The All Whites played at the expanded FIFA World Cup in North America earlier in the year before going out at the group stage following a 5-1 loss to Belgium, a tournament that put several Phoenix and Auckland FC players on the biggest stage of their careers. A high-profile club fixture at home keeps the sport in front of casual fans while the memory of the World Cup is still fresh.
There is a wider commercial logic to the tour as well. Wrexham’s owners have been open about using the club’s screen fame to grow its audience overseas, and Australia and New Zealand have proven to be among the strongest markets for the documentary outside Britain and the United States. Bringing the team to Wellington turns that television following into ticket sales, merchandise and a run of local coverage that few pre-season friendlies would ever generate.
For Wellington sports fans, the appeal is simpler. It is a chance to watch a club that has become a genuine cultural story play a competitive New Zealand side on home turf, on a July Saturday evening, without needing to stay up past midnight to catch it. Whether Wrexham treat it as a serious hit-out or a relaxed end to a long trip, the crowd at Sky Stadium will get a close look at the team the rest of the world has been watching.
Are you planning to head along to Sky Stadium on 19 July, or has the Welcome to Wrexham story pulled you in? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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