Why an NFL star fell in love with Wrexham: ‘They could lose every match and I would still support this club’

At first glance, former NFL quarterback Joey Harrington’s career doesn’t have too many parallels with Wrexham or soccer, a sport he stopped playing around the age of 10.

But the third overall pick in the 2002 NFL draft insists the Welsh club’s rise chimes with his own. So much so that Harrington and his family regularly wake up at home in Portland, in the west-coast state of Oregon, early on Saturdays to watch Phil Parkinson’s side playing live 4,750 miles away.

“If you had told me 10 years ago that I’d be buying a subscription to something called the Vanarama National League,” he says about the competition, the fifth-tier in English football’s pyramid, Wrexham won in 2022-23, “I’d have laughed at you.

“Now, though, I’m up at 6.30am every Saturday to catch the 7am match (3pm UK time). No way could I have imagined doing that just a few years ago. But, as a family, we’re totally wrapped up in the club and the journey they are on.”

Harrington’s own sporting journey comes with pedigree. His dad John played quarterback for the University of Oregon in the late 1960s and his grandfather Bernie did the same for the state’s University of Portland around 25 years earlier. If he hadn’t served in the Second World War, Bernie would no doubt have played in the NFL after being heavily courted by several teams, among them George Halas’ Chicago Bears.

Joey’s three years following in his father’s footsteps as Oregon’s quarterback proved transformational for the team, as they went from also-rans to being ranked No 2 in the U.S. college game. Harrington was the key man — and a Heisman Trophy finalist in 2001 — before the Detroit Lions drafted him the following year. Only fellow quarterback David Carr (Houston Texans) and future Hall of Famer Julius Peppers (Carolina Panthers) went off the board quicker.

He spent four seasons in Detroit, then had stints with the Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints. An impressive resume by any standards, but one that showed no indication of a retirement involving a small club playing a totally different sport on the other side of the Atlantic.

Enter series one of Welcome To Wrexham, the documentary charting Hollywood celebrities Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds’ takeover of the club, and a subsequent family visit to north Wales.

“Our sons, Jack and Emmet, had reached the age where you want to start exposing them to international travel,” Harrington says. “To give them a perspective of the world and what’s out there.

“We framed the trip by getting tickets through Nike (a major backer of the University of Oregon’s sports teams) to Manchester City versus Liverpool. The boys, both goalkeepers, were thrilled, as they had gravitated towards soccer, even though everyone assumed my kids would play American football.

“The plan was to spend time in London, call in to see some friends in Bristol and drive to Manchester. Jack, my eldest, then says, ‘Can we stop by Wrexham on the way?’ We’d all watched series one of the documentary by now and loved it.”

Wrexham were locked in a two-way scrap for the National League title with Notts County at the time, but when the Harrington family visited the ground they were given a warm welcome, including an impromptu ground tour from Geraint Parry, club secretary and Wrexham’s longest-serving member of staff.

“The first person we bump into in the tunnel is (Wrexham’s then goalkeeper and former England international) Ben Foster,” recalls Harrington. “He walks straight up to the boys, and I’m not exaggerating here, starts talking to them like they were family, asking all sorts of questions.

“When he found out their favourite position, straightaway he says, ‘I’m a goalkeeper, too, my name is Ben’. You could see the click in Jack’s eyes, as he realised, ‘Oh my God, this is Ben Foster, the England goalie’.

“Another three steps down the tunnel and (Wrexham’s manager) Phil Parkinson appears. He says, ‘Hi’ to the boys and then has a conversation with my wife, Emily, that she still talks about today. It’s probably a conversation he’s had a thousand times, one that he doesn’t even remember. But the fact he took a few moments to talk family and the boys with Emily said a lot to me.”

The Harringtons’ whistle-stop tour also involved meeting the club shop staff and head groundsman Paul Chaloner before calling in at The Turf, the pub next to Wrexham’s home which has been made famous by the documentary.

“Wayne (Jones, landlord) was brilliant with the boys,” he adds. “Made them feel so welcome that Jack, who remember is 13 at the time, so this is his first time in a bar, says to me, ‘Dad, can we play pool? There’s loads of quarters lined up on the table we can use.’

“I’m, like, ‘No, no, no, that isn’t how it works’. But the guy whose money it was said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you can have my slot’. At a time when the entire world was starting to convene on this small town in Wales, these guys treated my family like we were the first to visit.

“I’ve seen professional sports at the highest level, including a decade in the NFL. I’ve seen what that world looks like. So, as a father, to see how everyone — literally to a person, from the club shop staff to the guy running the pub and the Premier League goalkeeper who stopped a PK (penalty kick) against Notts County just a couple of weeks later — treated my kids and my family, Wrexham could lose every single match for eternity and I would still support this club.”

Autzen Stadium; Eugene, Oregon. October 12, 2024.

Actor Kaitlin Olson is back at her former university for the huge college football matchup between Oregon, who are ranked No 3 in the nation, and second-placed Ohio State. She’s joined in an Oregon record crowd of 60,129 by husband Rob. As in Rob McElhenney, her co-star in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Wrexham’s co-owner.

2 years ago @Wrexham_AFC welcomed my family. Saturday my OR&Wrexham worlds collided. ExDir @thehumphreyker is running 26.2 for @WrexhamMiners. To help, I’ll match every $ donated 2his cause up to $2,620. It’s a small world &kindness comes full circle pic.twitter.com/1tYU2SpfFx

— Joey Harrington (@joey3harrington) October 19, 2024

Also in attendance is Harrington, back where it all began for him as a college quarterback in the 1990s. They all get talking during the afternoon and later pose for a post-match celebratory photo that sees the trio perform the ‘O’ hand signal that has become synonymous with Harrington’s final Oregon game before turning pro.

“This was the first time I’d met Rob and Kaitlin,” he says. “They were great, no pretence about them at all. You’d never know they were Hollywood stars. They were just part of the family and were so welcoming to me and my friends.

“We chatted Wrexham and I showed them the photo of Ben Foster with the boys. How they both were didn’t surprise me. It’s exactly how we’d been treated in Wrexham, where the town, the team, the organisation follow the example of the leadership.”

Harrington and his family are yet to visit Wrexham for a match, though he hopes to rectify that next year. They did attend the pre-season friendly against Manchester United in San Diego, California, last year where Paul Mullin suffered four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, along with this July’s match between Wrexham women’s team and Portland Thorns that attracted a crowd of 10,379 — a record for the Welsh club.

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The latter came shortly after Harrington had been confirmed as an investor in National Women’s Soccer League club Thorns, alongside two-time Olympic decathlon Ashton Eaton and Olympic heptathlon bronze medalist Brianne Theisen-Eaton.

It’s quite the turnaround for someone who readily admits to being turned off the game for years by what he considered to be play-acting in men’s football.

“I’d see the guys go down on the pitch and a stretcher would be brought out to carry him off,” says Harrington, 46, who has pledged $2,620 to executive director Humphrey Ker’s fund-raising attempts for the Wrexham Miners’ Rescue by running next year’s Manchester marathon.

“He’d then get to the sideline, where the magic spray would come out and he’d be fine. I had no respect for that. So, despite playing until fourth grade, my experiences with soccer were not very positive.”

It took watching Canada’s Christine Sinclair, the sport’s all-time leading international goalscorer with 190 goals in 331 games, play for the University of Portland in the early 2000s to start changing his mind.

“Christine got knocked off the ball,” he recalls. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh great, here come the theatrics’. But, no, she popped right back up and gave the girl an elbow on the way back up. Not only was she instantly my favourite player but I thought, ‘I’m only going to watch women’s soccer’.”

Harrington playing for the Miami Dolphins in 2006 (Al Bello/Getty Images)

Welcome To Wrexham helped change that stance, especially after he started to spot those parallels between his own career and how the Welsh club’s fortunes were being transformed under Reynolds and McElhenney.

“What really resonates is the similarities with what has happened at Wrexham and my own time with the Oregon football programme,” he says. “When I showed up in ’97, we were seen as irrelevant by the rest. We were afterthoughts. So, a group of us sat down and decided to change things. We were going to win things, and specifically a national championship.

“A lot of people laughed at us. But we stuck at it and things began to change. OK, we didn’t win the national championship in my senior year, we finished No 2 in the country. But to put the programme in a place where we remain part of the national conversation was incredibly special.

“Later, I got to the NFL and it was a business — ‘What can you do for me? How am I going to get mine?’, stabbing people in the back to get another year (on your contract). Which I get when you’re in a multi-billion dollar business.

“But my point is I’ve personally experienced what can happen when you get a group of people together who truly not just care about the goal — which is coming out of irrelevance into prominence — but also each other. I see the same thing at Wrexham.

“There’s more to it than just putting butts on seats, there’s more to it than just scratching and clawing your way to the top. It’s how you do it and who you bring along and why you do it that also matters. Wrexham get that.”

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(Top photo: The Harringtons on their visit to the Racecourse Ground/Joey Harrington)