Why the US Is the Next Step in Wrexham Women’s Team’s Rise

The Wrexham AFC women’s team connected with viewers through their stories on FX’s Welcome to Wrexham, and their ascendant play took them to Wales’ top-tier Adran Premier League. 

Now, their U.S. tour looks to use a bit of sports marketing to connect them to global fans and brands.

Just two years ago, Wrexham owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney explained to audiences that when they bought Wrexham AFC to help promote its men’s team through the English football pyramid—which they’ve now done for two consecutive seasons—they didn’t know the club had a women’s team as well.

“Anyone who watches the show shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was one of the best surprises we’ve had,” McElhenney told ADWEEK. “We get the chance to support another team that has just as much potential and heart as our initial prospect.”

Perhaps more. Viewers met Rosie Hughes as a prison guard before learning she was the highest-scoring Wrexham player on its women’s team and any team in its organization. They learned about midfielder Lili Jones’ early career in England with Everton before returning to her hometown to play for Wrexham and wash dishes just after her father died in 2021. They met lifelong Wrexham fan Gemma Owen, a Welsh international field hockey player who helped relaunch senior women’s football at Wrexham in 2018 and now serves as the club’s head of women’s football operations.

And through it all, viewers saw the team rise from a low-tier league on a municipal mud patch to a Welsh-record crowd of 9,511 at its Racecourse home ground and eventual promotion.

“We want to promote what we’re doing on the women’s side, the players themselves and how amazing they are,” Owen told ADWEEK. “It’s key for us now, as we’re growing the [women’s] department and the game in the U.K., that we go out and try and expose ourselves to as many people and brands as we want to meet.”

After the Wrexham men did a small tour of the U.S. in 2023, the club began planning a similar effort for Wrexham’s women’s team. Both men’s and women’s players went to Cary, N.C., for The Soccer Tournament—a 7-on-7 open-invitation tournament in which Owen coached both teams. The Wrexham women went 0-3 but played squads consisting of National Women’s Soccer League’s Angel City FC players and alumni from the U.S. Women’s National Team’s World Cup and Olympic squads.

For their upcoming tour, the Wrexham women scouted teams that were of a similar semi-pro caliber as the Adran Premier League. With backing from Ally, Wrexham heads to UCLA’s Drake Stadium in Los Angeles to play semi-pro club SoCal FC on July 19 before taking on the under-19 squad of high-powered Mexican club Tigres Femenil—home of Spanish World Cup star Jenni Hermoso—in the same stadium on July 23. The trip wraps up in Portland, Ore., on July 26 with a matchup against NWSL club Portland Thorns Academy developmental team.

Throughout the trip, Wrexham women’s sponsors, including Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz sparkling soda, the McElhenny co-owned Four Walls Whiskey, Gatorade, HP Inc., STōK Cold Brew Coffee and United Airlines, will be making their presence known and reminding other suitors that when they buy into Wrexham, they buy into all of it—men’s team, women’s team, supporters group, show, tours and beyond.

“Smart partners understand how we’re uniquely able to harness the power of storytelling across that whole community to show what their brand stands for well beyond a logo on the sidelines,” McElhenney said.

Making an early Ally

Ally has supported Wrexham AFC since Season 1 of Welcome to Wrexham and also partners with The Soccer Tournament. Previously committing to a 50/50 split of its sports marketing resources between men’s and women’s sports, Ally saw an opportunity with Wrexham to fulfill that pledge during a year lacking the Women’s World Cup or a similar women’s sports-specific event.

“It’s a story that has scale and appeal that gives you a bigger stage to communicate the narrative around equity in women’s sports,” Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer told ADWEEK. “I thought about Wrexham as an entertainment platform that had broader appeal and broader scale, where I could reach a lot of men to tell the story as well, so we thought about it very differently in that it wasn’t just a ‘sports sponsorship.’ It became a communication platform by which to shine a light on the work that needed to be done.”

Discussions between Ally and Wrexham began just before the most recent season of Welcome to Wrexham aired and in the wake of the men’s “USA Invasion” tour last summer. In Season 4, however, Brimmer and McElhenney used time within Welcome to Wrexham to highlight Ally’s mission and to preview the upcoming tour—with Disney promoting the segment in all of its Wrexham social media channels.

Does it matter that Ally’s U.S. online bank may never do business with Wrexham’s Welsh supporters? Not really, Brimmer posited, as the exposure for Ally from the show and the introduction of a larger segment of U.S. viewers to both the Wrexham women’s team and live soccer made it worthwhile.

It also helped matters that Ally just happens to sponsor the NWSL—which gave it a relationship with the Portland Thorns—and sponsored events at Portland’s women’s sports-focused Sports Bra with owner Jenny Nguyen around soccer’s Women’s International Champions Cup. Oh, and there’s the small matter of Ally and Disney’s deal last year that invested 90% of Ally’s media spend into women’s sports—including regular, branded ESPN SportsCenter segments.

“That’s why I call this the big, beautiful ecosystem of women’s sports,” Brimmer said. “Anytime there’s something that we’re doing, there’s a whole army of people that comes out of the ecosystem that’s like, ‘Hey, we’ll help you connect it.’”

Why you play the game

For the Wrexham women’s team, that ecosystem expanded exponentially within the last 12 months.

Promotion came with travel, overnight stays, new licensing and increased player contracts and payments—and all of the administrative duties that come with it. For players, it meant a step up in competition and finishing third behind teams in Swansea and Cardiff that were more polished but perhaps “not a million miles off,” Owen noted.

The U.S. tour is another chance to showcase how far they’ve come.

“In terms of pure talent, with the women’s promotion to the Adran Premier league, they demonstrated that they deserved an opportunity like this to show off their skills on a wider stage,” McElhenney said. “Ryan and I have also been sharing the more personal side of the women’s team over the last season and finding that, just as they have with the men’s team, our audience is identifying with their stories and struggles, so this gives fans a chance to be inspired by their favorites in real life.”

Supporters aren’t the only audience watching.

While Owen hopes The Soccer Tournament and the tour provide the team a strong preseason challenge heading into their second Premier League campaign in September, she also said it may help players with another recent development: Sponsor demand. Players who once practiced, played and went home have adapted to promotions, publicity and activations—which has brought more brand attention.

“It’s getting more people involved in the game, and people coming to see Rosie, Lili and all the rest of the girls and being able to see what they can do and what they can be themselves,” Owen said. “It is a success story in terms of how much these girls are getting noticed in the street. It’s brilliant, and we hope to see more and more brands getting involved with women’s sports and women’s football.”

Ally’s Brimmer was once one of those viewers. While she said the Wrexham women’s tour is an opportunity to activate the women’s sports ecosystem and introduce the team to new brand followers, it’s also a chance for players to display their skills before an audience that Welcome to Wrexham may not reach.

“When you bring teams like Wrexham over and do these kinds of tours, then it’s going to not only allow fans to showcase the best of soccer in this country, but it’s also going to give these players a showcase like they’ve never had before,” Brimmer said. “Maybe they don’t get invited to a national team camp, but now they might be in front of a scout that they would not have had an opportunity to be in front of.”