If you’re into football, or Hollywood celebrities, or have been just surfing social media, you would have heard of Wrexham AFC, a small football club in North Wales.

After 15 years out of the top ranks of the English professional league (which also includes Wales), they finally made it back and will play in League 2, the lowest tier in the English Football League.

Ho hum. So what, you say?

Whatever we might feel about Britain, we do love their football, one of the very few things they do well. The country has lost its empire, its industry doesn’t make must-have products, and its politicians are as hopeless as our own, as if that’s even possible.

But their football still reigns supreme and heading for greater heights. Tons of money is being pumped in by oil sheikhs and Russian oligarchs, whose access to cash seems limitless.

Not a shooting star

This hasn’t always been so. Not too long ago, British football was as drab as British food and weather, followed only by a handful of Anglophiles who avidly read the latest copy of the British football magazine Shoot!, which was weeks if not months out of date by the time it arrived on our shores.

I used to play football myself, even if I was a hopeless player. The only position I was allowed to play was goalkeeper, because that’s the position nobody else wanted. I was enthusiastic, but given that I was thin and blind as a bat, I wasn’t even close to being mediocre.

I went on to study in England and ended up in a small market town that had produced Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” British prime minister, and a certain Isaac Newton. Grantham was close to Nottingham, a much larger and more historical town and, better still, one with professional football clubs!

At home with Nottingham Forest

That was also the year the Nottingham Forest club was promoted to Division 1, which has since broken off and become the Premier League. Nottingham Forest are the oldest team currently in the league (after Notts County was demoted). Forest once helped a struggling north London team with a set of kit in their famous red and white colours, which both teams wear to this day.

Forest did amazingly well upon promotion, going on to win the League title in the first season, something unlikely to ever happen again. Nottingham was close enough for us to regularly go to matches at the City Ground on Saturdays when they had home games.

The manager of the team was the legendary Brian Clough, aided by his sidekick Peter Taylor; the pair had worked the same miracles at nearby Derby County a few years earlier. They were both larger than life characters, as are many famous people in sport.

On the freezing terraces

Some die-hard fans who’d supported Nottingham Forest through thick and thin over the years weren’t so happy to see so many new faces wearing the famous red and white scarves when the team started to do well. Chants of “part-time supporters” would be hurled at us newbies regularly.

We didn’t care. Getting in to watch the game cost one pound each, paid at the turnstiles, and we got to stand on the terraces, often in freezing and blustery cold weather. The rich would sit in the covered grandstands, but no true supporters want to be seen dead there.

The team then had players such as England’s goalkeeper Peter Shilton (my favourite, given that I was often a goalkeeper myself), Archie Gemmill, Trevor Francis, Martin O’Neill, Viv Anderson and John McGovern. On the field, they were almost within touching distance to us fans, and you could hear them shouting over the crowd noise.

When Cruyff destroyed England

I also went to the old Wembley stadium a few times to watch Forest play in Cup finals. Once I even got to watch a friendly match between England and Holland, the losing finalists to West Germany in the 1974 World Cup.

With the likes of Johann Cruyff, Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens in the squad, the Dutch tore apart England’s team, featuring Kevin Keegan, Trevor Brooking and with Ray Clemence in goal, and not my favourite Peter Shilton. The Dutch performance was a consummate version of Total Football, and magical, memories of which still send shivers down my spine.

At the end, the 90,000 fans in attendance were singing “what a load of rubbish” at the hapless England side. But it was a wondrous experience nevertheless, and the match is often mentioned as one of the most magical matches in Wembley’s long and glorious history.

And I was there. But I had also been elsewhere. I used to watch Penang play at its own City Stadium in George Town, though they are often painful experiences.

Kampung kickabout

One of my most memorable football matches was a late afternoon kampung football game near Tawau, Sabah, many years ago. It certainly wasn’t a regulation match, with probably half of the kampung on each side. But it was energetic, serious and lovely.

Most players played in bare feet, though there were two players who shared a pair of shoes. One wore the right foot shoe, while the other wore the left one, with the shoe probably on their dominant foot, though these people aren’t too fussy with whatever they can get hold of.

Many football supporters nowadays are fussy, though. They got to choose their own team while growing up. Hence you have many diehard supporters of Liverpool or Manchester United or City or the big London teams Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspurs, Chelsea etc, who have never even been to those places.

Football: the brand

That by itself is not a problem, but I’m not sure how much they actually love football. How many of them have gone to see football matches at our local grounds or stadiums, or stopped by the roadside to watch a game in Tawau or Temerloh? Many look down on such matches, deemed not interesting enough for their rarefied tastes.

Perhaps they don’t really love football, but love brands instead. Football now is a huge business and is being marketed and branded the way people market and brand junk foods or mobile phones: as a business run for profits.

The game nowadays itself is still brilliant, perhaps even more so with modern techniques, fitness and strategies, and fantastic TV coverage. But romance is often missing.

Magic of the beautiful game

And then comes a story like that of Wrexham FC, bought by two Hollywood celebrities who poured money and love and glamour into it, and in the end seemed to have been as caught up in the “beautiful game” as anybody else.

The team have become one of the most famous football teams on earth, more famous than even the storied Nottingham Forest, who are busy trying to escape relegation from the Premier League.

But Wrexham AFC remains the pride of Wrexham, and will always be supported by true fans, even if the part-time supporters may one day desert it. It hasn’t lost the charm and the magic of football, the reason why it is the most popular sport in the world.

As Bill Shankly, the manager of the old Liverpool team, once said “some people believe football is a matter of life and death…I can assure you it is much, much more important than that”.

You know, it could very well be.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.