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Humphrey Ker has revealed the timeline he is targeting for Wrexham to reach the promised land of the Premier League after they secured promotion to League One at the first time of asking.
Ker – the writer, comedian and actor who first introduced the idea of buying an English football club to Rob McElhenney and is now Wrexham’s executive director – has become a fan favourite on Disney+ docuseries Welcome to Wrexham as the affable British conduit between the club and celebrity owners McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds.
After finally achieving a return to the Football League after 15 years away at the end of the 2022-23 season, Wrexham successfully navigated League Two to secure back-to-back promotions by finishing in second place behind Stockport County and, come August, will play League One football for the first time in two decades.
Given the money and support behind the club, fans will inevitably be dreaming of a third straight promotion and a place in the Championship but Ker is keen to manage expectations.
“I think promotion would be a real push,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Independent. “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.”
With the upcoming third season of Welcome to Wrexham yet again getting a fairytale ending, thoughts in some quarters are turning to whether eventually the club can get the ultimate Hollywood finale of promotion to the Premier League.
Now in the third tier, they are just two promotions away from that happening and Ker admits that is a clear target for everyone at the club.
“Sort of as quickly as possible,” he said when asked what the timeline to become a Premier League club is. “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.”
And Ker also acknowledges that the speed of the club’s promotions does come with some personal downsides.
“The real double-edged sword of our success is that we can’t take everybody with us on the journey,” added Ker. “Particularly this summer, I think there’ll be one or two faces going who are real heroes of the last couple of years, who have either reached an age where they are starting to lose half a yard of pace or they just wouldn’t necessarily be starting games.
“There were people who left last summer that I was sad to see go but I think there will be two or three this summer that will be really, really sad to see go. I hope that they’ll still come back and still be a part of the future with us.”
Source: independent.co.uk
