FROM CLWYD TO CALIFORNIA VIA CAKALACKY IN 12 MONTHS
Attempts to rebrand a long-established product can prove a risky business. Take for example the questionable rechristening of Twitter, a name part and parcel of internet vernacular, with the meaningless nepo-baby-approved brand-awareness-junking letter X. Or how about the all-new Football Daily, which you may or may not have erroneously clicked on to expecting to find Max and Barry, but no this isn’t the podcast, it’s what The Fiver used to be, so sorry about that. Is this what you were after? Go if you must, we understand, we shan’t be offended.
One rebrand that has however been pulled off with elan is that of Wrexham AFC, which now trades under the moniker Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s Wrexham (in association with Disney™ and United Airlines™)™. This new enterprise has been a roaring success from the get-go, transforming the world’s third-oldest club, a modest outfit previously best known for putting 10 goals past Hartlepool in 1962, by instantly turning them into a media juggernaut so beloved Stateside that they’re able to attract more than 50,000 fans in the beating heart of college basketball country: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of the Tar Heels. Michael Jordan’s alma mater, for goodness sake. We’d rather have spent our time there eating shrimp n’ grits at Crook’s Corner, enjoying a Jordan-endorsed chicken biscuit at Time Out, or maybe even watching some college basketball, but each to their own.
And so having captured the eastern seaboard, Wrexham have since moseyed out west to wow the locals in San Diego, where they’re turning more heads on the street than Manchester United, the bunch of non-documentary-starring nobodies they play later on Tuesday night at the 35,000-capacity Snapdragon Stadium. As rebrands go it’s been a roaring success, and yet their Hollywood-or-bust ambition doesn’t end here. When asked whether the Premier League was New WreXham™’s ultimate goal, manager Phil Parkinson shrugs. “When you look at teams like Luton who go up, you’ve got to say why not?” And that’s fair enough. Football Daily gives them more of a chance of achieving their ambitious targets than Mr Elon, let’s put it that way.
CHRIS BART-WILLIAMS (1974-2023)
The former Nottingham Forest and Sheffield Wednesday player, Chris Bart-Williams, has died at the age of 49. A classy, versatile operator who played in central midfield or at centre-back, Bart-Williams became a hero at both the City Ground and at Hillsborough, the clubs where he stayed longest. He amassed 248 appearance for Forest and 156 for the Owls, combining superb positional sense and discipline with a fine range of passing. He was one of those distinctive, memorable players who generally appeared to have more time than everyone else on the pitch. Having started his career at Leyton Orient, he also went on to play for Charlton, Ipswich, Apoel in Cyprus and Marsaxlokk in Malta, before retiring in 2006. He moved to the US and worked as a coach and mentor, including roles in women’s football and in schools. Reacting to news of his death, Nigel Pearson described Bart-Williams as “a genuinely lovely guy”, Chris Waddle called him “a good lad and a very talented footballer”, while Richard Williams, formerly of this parish, wrote that he “looked as though he possessed the qualities needed to become one of the great holding midfield players but was probably too versatile for his own good”. RIP.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The only thing I wanted to do was be a footballer. I wasn’t going to let these people derail that. I made a conscious effort to just dismiss it and get on with it. There wasn’t an alternative. You couldn’t walk off because it wasn’t done” – Viv Anderson, the England men’s team’s first black player, on how he dealt with racist abuse from fans in the late 1970s. Read the interview here.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
RIP Trevor Francis. Sad to read of his passing. He was a year older than me. We both lived in Plymouth. One day at a public park pick-up game, I found myself as a full-back against him. In less than five minutes, it was obvious he was to go on to be a successful player and I would have to make do with refereeing. I lost count of the number of times he waltzed past me and the number of goals he scored. Safe to say our paths never crossed on the field of play again” – Nick Little.
Legend had it that, back in the day, Trevor Francis and Midlands jokester Jasper Carrott were sometimes mistaken for one another. Carrott, allegedly, would go along with it, to the point of autographing items in Francis’s name. That and seeing him (Francis, not Carrott) play several times at St Andrew’s are my memories of a player some say would have played more for England had he not stayed at Birmingham so long” – Carl Zetie.
Fifa continues to shoot itself in the foot, opting for no paper tickets at the Women’s World Cup. This means having their app on your smartphone. I am going to Brazil v France this coming Saturday with a friend (yes, I have one), but his phone isn’t smart enough to cope with the app. So for his $30 ticket, he has had to acquire a new phone, making it a much more expensive experience than he had planned. Well done Fifa, you sure have your moments, but I am hard pressed at present to think of any that favour the football community at large” – Ewen Anderson.
May I be the first of … well, probably just one, honestly … to point out that Scrooge McDuck has a money bin, not a money pit (yesterday’s Football Daily)? And that furthermore he only has the single bin, so it would be quite impossible for Kylian Mbappé (or anyone else) to be caught between them? Getting the occasional minor detail wrong is one thing when it comes to football itself, but this is a bridge too far” – Edward Dean (and no others).
Colin Reed (Friday’s letters) asks how Saudi Arabia’s PIF can purchase a player it already owns. Among the many highlights of Joe Kinnear’s brief spell at Newcastle United was the time he went to watch a Birmingham City game and praised the performance of Shane Ferguson … who was actually on loan there from the Toon. This all suggests far greater awareness of the Newcastle b@nter era than the Saudi PIF is usually given credit for. It should still get in the bin, obviously” – Ed Taylor.
If the correction on this article shows anything (other than the universe is actually pretty big), then the spirit of your pedants still lingers around Big Website Towers” – Darren Leathley.
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Darren Leathley.
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