Wrexham Women are coming to the United States this summer, taking part in the 2024 “Wrex Coast Tour”.
Fans of the Welcome to Wrexham documentary got a close look at the women’s team in season two, which showcased several key figures such as prison-guard-by-day, leading-scorer-by-night Rosie Hughes, teenage midfielder Lili Jones, and the ever-present head of women’s football, Gemma Owen.
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The introductory episode, Ballers, was a familiar scene for anyone who has followed women’s football over the years: the women’s team ploughing along on a muddy, churned-up field while scoring prodigiously and ultimately winning their league, Adran North. Co-owner Rob McElhenney congratulated the players after the game, then marvelled at the rough playing surface.
You can expect the women to return for season three.
“We’ve continued to tell the story of our women’s team, both from a human and sporting point of view,” McElhenney told The Athletic. “I’m most excited for our fans to continue to get to know our players on and off the pitch and for our journey to be the best in Wales.”
The team has since moved to The Rock Stadium, where they now play in the Adran Premier after winning promotion via a playoff game against the winners of Adran South.
They have adjusted to the highest tier of Welsh women’s football, sitting in third behind two of the league’s traditional heavyweights, Cardiff City and Swansea. McElhenney deftly avoided directly answering questions about eventual Champions League ambitions — Swansea earned Adran Premier’s only UWCL slot last year — but perhaps hinted that it was on their minds.
“Our goal this year was to become the best football club in Wales,” he said. “Heading into the second phase of our season, we have a true shot at making that happen. Our ultimate goal is to make Wrexham the best women’s football team in the world. I say that with great respect for the incredible talent around the globe in women’s football. We know the journey will be long and arduous, but if you’re gonna dream, why not dream big?”
For now, they’re continuing to develop Wrexham’s relevance as a global brand. What other semi-professional team would or could organize an international tour in conjunction with a major brand in Ally Financial and could realistically expect big crowds?
Ally’s chief marketing and public relations officer, Andrea Brimmer, said the partnership has been a year in the making, from initial meetings in Los Angeles between Brimmer and Wrexham owners McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds. Though she was already a Welcome to Wrexham viewer, the club reached out first having seen Ally’s work with the National Women’s Soccer League.
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American soccer fans already know Ally as an NWSL sponsor, especially following Ally’s push to move the 2022 championship game to a prime-time television slot after it was originally scheduled for 12pm ET.
At the time, Brimmer emphasized how important the “prime-time-ification” of women’s sports was to being able to monetize it and discussed how putting women’s sports in a desirable time slot was important to bring in more money from blue-chip sponsors. Though Wrexham Women might be a semi-professional team, Brimmer still sees an opportunity for that kind of prime-time storytelling.
“I think fans of women’s sports have a deep yearning to hear the backstory,” she said. “They want more proximity to the athlete and female athletes (and) because of the fact they have historically not been paid to play sports the way they should be, they’ve had to create their own social currency. And so they’ve really provided that access as a way to monetize.”
McElhenney struck a similar tone.
“We see women’s sports as one of the biggest business opportunities in front of us right now,” he said. “So we will continue to explore all scenarios that showcase Wrexham Women in that regard, starting with bringing on the first sponsor specific to our Women’s side and bringing them over to the U.S. for matches this summer.”
“One of the things that was so attractive to me about this,” said Brimmer, “is you saw they took a mediocre team (in Wrexham’s men side) and, with investment and intentionality, they turned it into a powerhouse. And that paralleled what we were trying to do with women’s sports, which is you had this product that didn’t have any attention and as a result was kind of wallowing in the background.”
The lack of attention wasn’t the result of an inherently inferior product or an uninterested audience, Brimmer cautioned, but a false narrative about viewers’ unwillingness to watch women’s sports. It’s an attitude that still pervades the business world, in her experience.
“I had somebody ask me, ‘Well, you must be paying insane CPMs (cost per mille) for all your women’s sports media because there’s no audience there’,” said Brimmer. CPM, also known as cost per thousand, is a paid advertising option where companies pay a price for every 1,000 an ad receives on a web page. “First of all, we’re not paying insane CPMs because we’re creating the media or we’re working with partners to create the media. Secondly, the audience has been there. We’ve proven it time and again.”
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There are plenty of examples: NWSL’s improved championship ratings for the past two years show a 71 percent year-on-year increase. Final Four ratings for women’s college basketball reached a record high in 2023 and then there’s the Caitlin Clark effect on ticket sales wherever she goes.
Partnering with women’s sports certainly hasn’t hurt Ally. Brimmer said the company finished 2023 with the highest level of brand awareness and positive brand sentiment in its history.
“Is it 100 percent attributable to the things we’re doing in women’s sports? No,” she said. “But what I argue with anybody (is) that it sure has a hell of a lot to do with it.”
The Wrexham Women’s tour is yet another data point in the landscape of how women’s football is a moneymaker. Women’s sports have always hosted great storylines; it’s now a matter of better understanding how fans value those stories and delivering them to bigger audiences.
“We all know that these (women’s sports) stories exist,” said Brimmer. “You need big stages to be able to tell them and it’s hard to do it. If we’re constantly just trying to do it through media interviews or on stages at women’s sports conferences, we all know the story, right? What you need is math and scale so then a broader audience can understand the story and can help fight for and appreciate the quest for parity.”
(Top photo: Jan Kruger/Getty Images)