Wrexham’s executive director Humphrey Ker had admitted the club hope to achieve promotion to the Premier League “sort of as quickly as possible”.
The Red Dragons recently booked their place in League One, securing back-to-back promotions after a whirlwind first season back in the English Football League.
All eyes are on Wrexham because of the worldwide fame and wealth of co-owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, whose involvement with the Welsh club stemmed from Ker being instructed by the duo to look for a historic football club to purchase.
Many believe Wrexham can quickly build on their success and continue working up the English football pyramid, and Ker didn’t downplay the club’s aspirations in an interview with The Independent.
“Sort of as quickly as possible,” he replied when asked for a projected timeline of reaching the Premier League. Whilst being mindful of those challenges I was just talking about, with facilities and infrastructure.
“Our commercial department is very strong and we make huge amounts of money from selling shirts off the back of the documentary and from sponsorship. All that’s very, very strong but it’s also quite fragile because we don’t have a big operation behind it.”
Ker did attempt to manage expectations, however, stating that immediate promotion to the Championship may be a bridge too far regardless of the club’s pulling power and rapidly increasing reputation.
“I think promotion would be a real push,” he said. “I think we’ve often talked about the idea that it takes three transfer windows to really build a squad into what you need to compete in any one division and next season will be one window shorter than that.
“But I think the core of this team is very strong. They’re very strong personalities, good players and they love each other, so that’s a great basis to build from. We’ll be adding players in the summer and sadly saying goodbye to one or two, which is sort of just the nature of football, and then we’ll sort of see where we wind up.
“Inside the building, we’re like, ‘look, our objective is get up and stay up, stabilise and build a good platform and go again the following year.’ But stranger things than promotion have happened – we might go through the division again.
“To be honest, that would probably be too fast for us. It wouldn’t actually be that good for the club as a whole if we did go all the way through this year because we’d just be going so quickly. Then we’d be trying to catch up with infrastructure and our facilities and everything would be a big, big challenge. So I think something nice and comfortable – upper mid-table, please! Tenth. I’d be very happy with that.”
