Amber Lightfoot will probably be on your television screens sometime this year.
At least, Wrexham’s 22-year-old attacking midfielder sure hopes so. We can’t know for certain, being just a lowly journalist with no say in the scrupulous editing processes of Hollywood.
But Lightfoot’s stoppage-time goal against Connah’s Quay in February – the one that indisputably put the first-versus-second fixture to its dramatic bed, securing Wrexham Women’s first-place berth in the Adran North league table and keeping intact the Reds’ perfect league record as they continued their unsullied romp to the title and next month’s second-tier promotion final – feels worthy enough. Welcome to Wrexham Season Two-ey enough.
The bedlam caught on the docuseries cameras certainly feels it.
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Yes, it’s weird, the cameras, which have been following Wrexham’s women’s team around like nice but constant flies this season. Lightfoot admits with a bashful but endearing smile that she’s grown familiar with them now. Such is the requisite when playing for the club.
She’s also grown used to the dramatics. There’s a law, written somewhere deep in the belly of football, that any match including Wrexham AFC must be inexplicably dramatic. A recurring heart-attack-and-defibrillator loop of emotional turmoil. Since Hollywood’s descent on the small north Wales town, that covenant has been working double time.
So yes, of course, Lightfoot’s stoppage-time goal had to be a stoppage-time goal.
What Lightfoot isn’t necessarily familiar with is a Welsh domestic record crowd of (at the time of writing) more than 7,000 watching her play football from the stands of the world’s third oldest ground. She’s been to the Racecourse Ground before, for photo-ops and social media duties. (The club is, after all, a very swiftly growing financial arm of an American television guru and a Hollywood movie star. Lightfoot is now part of that arm.)
But Lightfoot, nor any Wrexham Women’s player past or present for that matter, has ever played competitively under the old, blinding lights, nor such a teeming audience. The largest crowd Lightfoot has ever entertained is a rough guess-timate of a thousand while playing for Liverpool Women’s under-21s in a tournament finale.
But 7,000-plus?
Lightfoot is managing a cocktail of equal parts excitement and nerves for Sunday’s final regular season match against Connah’s Quay, albeit with an appreciable dash of confidence.
“It’s nice to go into the last match knowing that we’ve won the league, but we still want to win. We want to go all season without being beat,” she says. “And I think we definitely can do it. I know I’m biased, but we are definitely the best team in the league.”
Bias or not, the facts track. Wrexham have won all 11 league matches this season. They boast a goal difference of 63, more than double that of second-place Connah’s Quay. They're one match away from historic promotion, and after narrowly missing out on the league title last season, “the hunger is deeper”.
On a personal note, Lightfoot is relishing the best season of her career, netting 16 goals, second-most in her team, and providing another eight.
The recent success hasn’t gone unnoticed. The women’s team feature consistently on the Wrexham’s owners Twitter accounts (a humble 22.2million followers between the North American duo). Lightfoot has received a personal shout out after her four goals in the 6-0 demolition job of CPDMY Felinheli in January.
“I can’t lie, that was mad,” she laughs. “I was going into work the next day and everyone had seen it. I think it got like 1.5 or maybe more million views. I got loads of followers off it.
“But,” she says, her tone taking on a raw earnestness. “That just shows they keep up to date with us, check on how we’re doing, and that they genuinely care. It’s really nice for me because it shows they’re actually recognising what we’re doing, and supporting it.
“Like, you’re getting recognised for what you’re doing by the people who actually own the club. Do you know what I mean?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but the thought that some of the most successful footballers in the game don’t actually know the feeling is an ironically humorous one. Such sincerity is one of the more powerful distinguishing traits of Wrexham’s new ownership, a sense that the club functions as an immediate publication of the owners’ everyday lives rather than a cash cow on the proverbial back stove.
The reality cuts the club as something of an iconoclast in the typical American ownership model, but also in Wales’ domestic league. McElhenney and Reynolds made clear their ambitions to transform Wrexham into the vanguard in Wales’ women’s game, a first major step arriving in the offer of semi-professional status of the senior team if promotion to the Adran Premier is secured.
For Lightfoot, the prospect was unimaginable just a few months ago, and the sense of genuine support from the top-down translates directly to the team’s success on the pitch.
“You feel that support, so you almost feel like, because you know that there are so many other people watching our scores, seeing how we're doing, we do it for them as well,” Lightfoot says.
“We know that Wrexham is becoming this big club, we know we've got a reputation to live up to now, and I feel like we definitely done that this season.”
On a technical level, Sunday’s match is little more than a dead rubber. Yet, for the squad its meaning is significant, from a tangible signpost of the growth of the women’s game in Wales to the statement of appreciation from Wrexham’s topbrass.
There’s also the matter of momentum, and how pivotal a win could be in supercharging Steve Dale’s side before the promotion play-off final against Briton Ferry and a crack at an historic berth in the Welsh top flight.
Not that Lightfoot allows herself to think that far, nor the prospect of a double senior team promotion. She’s focused on Sunday’s difficult match against a difficult opponent. There’s a nice note of circularity about it all as she faces Connah’s Quay once more. Might Lightfoot find the back of the net again in front of the cameras and crowd?
“Oh, scoring at the Racecourse this weekend, that would top my career,” Lightfoot says, lifting her hand for visual effect. “So, fingers crossed.”
The odds are good. Lightfoot has 16 goals, beaten only by teammate Rosie Hughes, who boasts 23. It’s put to Lightfoot that she and her goal-glutton of an attack partner are not unlike Paul Mullin and Ollie Palmer, the Wrexham men’s players who have transcended the National League pitch to become loveable avatars for WTW fans around the world.
Lightfoot laughs good naturedly. Hughes has definitely been compared to Mullin more than once. Later, however, we return to this comparison and it’s decided that while metaphorically assuming an avatar of the men’s team has its fun, when the next season of WTW airs, perhaps Lightfoot and Hughes will become their own avatars.
“I hope so. That for young girls, they could look up to me and Rosie and be like, ‘oh, we wanna be them. We’re the Amber and Rosie of our team.’ That would be great,” she says.
“Instead of having to choose a men’s player (which Lightfoot clarifies is ‘totally fine’), they can finally have women’s footballers to look up to.
“It’s happening in the Women’s Super League, after the Euros. And all the little girls who come to watch us play, I’d love for them to look up at me and Rosie and want to be us.”
On Sunday, the likelihood feels high.
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