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

At first look, former NFL quarterback Joey Harrington’s profession doesn’t have too many parallels with Wrexham or soccer, a sport he stopped taking part in across the age of 10.

However the third total choose within the 2002 NFL draft insists the Welsh membership’s rise chimes along with his personal. A lot in order that Harrington and his household frequently get up at dwelling in Portland, within the west-coast state of Oregon, early on Saturdays to look at Phil Parkinson’s facet taking part in dwell 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 concerning the competitors, the fifth-tier in English soccer’s pyramid, Wrexham received 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 personal sporting journey comes with pedigree. His dad John performed quarterback for the College of Oregon within the late Nineteen Sixties and his grandfather Bernie did the identical for the state’s College of Portland round 25 years earlier. If he hadn’t served within the Second World Warfare, Bernie would little question have performed within the NFL after being closely courted by a number of groups, amongst them George Halas’ Chicago Bears.

Joey’s three years following in his father’s footsteps as Oregon’s quarterback proved transformational for the crew, as they went from also-rans to being ranked No 2 within the U.S. faculty sport. Harrington was the important thing man — and a Heisman Trophy finalist in 2001 — earlier than the Detroit Lions drafted him the next 12 months. Solely fellow quarterback David Carr (Houston Texans) and future Corridor of Famer Julius Peppers (Carolina Panthers) went off the board faster.

He spent 4 seasons in Detroit, then had stints with the Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints. A formidable resume by any requirements, however one which confirmed no indication of a retirement involving a small membership taking part in a very completely different sport on the opposite facet of the Atlantic.

Enter sequence considered one of Welcome To Wrexham, the documentary charting Hollywood celebrities Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds’ takeover of the membership, and a subsequent household go to 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 present them a perspective of the world and what’s on the market.

“We framed the journey by getting tickets by way of Nike (a serious backer of the College of Oregon’s sports activities groups) to Manchester Metropolis versus Liverpool. The boys, each goalkeepers, have been thrilled, as that they had gravitated in the direction of soccer, regardless that everybody assumed my children would play American soccer.

“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 have been locked in a two-way scrap for the Nationwide League title with Notts County on the time, however when the Harrington household visited the bottom they got a heat welcome, together with an impromptu floor tour from Geraint Parry, membership secretary and Wrexham’s longest-serving member of workers.

“The first person we bump into in the tunnel is (Wrexham’s then goalkeeper and former England international) Ben Foster,” remembers Harrington. “He walks straight as much as the boys, and I’m not exaggerating right here, begins speaking to them like they have been household, asking all kinds of questions.

“When he came upon their favorite place, straightaway he says, ‘I’m a goalkeeper, too, my identify is Ben’. You can see the clicking 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 additionally concerned assembly the membership store workers and head groundsman Paul Chaloner earlier than calling in at The Turf, the pub subsequent to Wrexham’s dwelling which has been made well-known by the documentary.

“Wayne (Jones, landlord) was brilliant with the boys,” he provides. “Made them really feel so welcome that Jack, who keep in mind is 13 on the time, so that is his first time in a bar, says to me, ‘Dad, can we play pool? There’s a great deal of quarters lined up on the desk we are able to use.’

“I’m, like, ‘No, no, no, that isn’t the way it works’. However the man whose cash it was stated, ‘Don’t fear about it, you possibly can have my slot’. At a time when your complete world was beginning to convene on this small city in Wales, these guys handled my household like we have been the primary to go to.

“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.”

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

Actor Kaitlin Olson is again at her former college for the massive faculty soccer matchup between Oregon, who’re ranked No 3 within the nation, and second-placed Ohio State. She’s joined in an Oregon file crowd of 60,129 by husband Rob. As in Rob McElhenney, her co-star in It’s All the time Sunny in Philadelphia and Wrexham’s co-owner.

2 years in the past @Wrexham_AFC welcomed my household. Saturday my OR&Wrexham worlds collided. ExDir @thehumphreyker is working 26.2 for @WrexhamMiners. To assist, I’ll match each $ donated 2his trigger as much as $2,620. It’s a small world &kindness comes full circlehttps://t.co/DyzB8WQ2JD pic.twitter.com/1tYU2SpfFx

— Joey Harrington (@joey3harrington) October 19, 2024

Additionally in attendance is Harrington, again the place all of it started for him as a school quarterback within the Nineteen Nineties. All of them get speaking in the course of the afternoon and later pose for a post-match celebratory photograph that sees the trio carry out the ‘O’ hand sign that has turn out to be synonymous with Harrington’s remaining Oregon sport earlier than turning professional.

“This was the first time I’d met Rob and Kaitlin,” he says. “They have been nice, no pretence about them in any respect. You’d by no means know they have been Hollywood stars. They have been simply a part of the household and have been so welcoming to me and my mates.

“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 household are but to go to Wrexham for a match, although he hopes to rectify that subsequent 12 months. They did attend the pre-season pleasant towards Manchester United in San Diego, California, final 12 months the place Paul Mullin suffered 4 damaged ribs and a collapsed lung, together with this July’s match between Wrexham girls’s crew and Portland Thorns that attracted a crowd of 10,379 — a file for the Welsh membership.

The latter got here shortly after Harrington had been confirmed as an investor in Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League membership Thorns, alongside two-time Olympic decathlon Ashton Eaton and Olympic heptathlon bronze medalist Brianne Theisen-Eaton.

It’s fairly the turnaround for somebody who readily admits to being turned off the sport for years by what he thought-about to be play-acting in males’s soccer.

“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 govt director Humphrey Ker’s fund-raising makes an attempt for the Wrexham Miners’ Rescue by working subsequent 12 months’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 game’s all-time main worldwide goalscorer with 190 targets in 331 video games, play for the College of Portland within the early 2000s to start out altering his thoughts.

“Christine got knocked off the ball,” he remembers. “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’.”

Welcome To Wrexham helped change that stance, particularly after he began to identify these parallels between his personal profession and the way the Welsh membership’s fortunes have been being reworked beneath 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. “After I confirmed up in ’97, we have been seen as irrelevant by the remaining. We have been afterthoughts. So, a bunch of us sat down and determined to alter issues. We have been going to win issues, and particularly a nationwide championship.

“Lots of people laughed at us. However we caught at it and issues started to alter. OK, we didn’t win the nationwide championship in my senior 12 months, we completed No 2 within the nation. However to place the programme in a spot the place we stay a part of the nationwide dialog was extremely particular.

“Later, I bought to the NFL and it was a enterprise — ‘What can you do for me? How am I going to get mine?’, stabbing individuals within the again to get one other 12 months (in your contract). Which I get whenever you’re in a multi-billion greenback enterprise.

“However my level is I’ve personally skilled what can occur whenever you get a bunch of individuals collectively who really not simply care concerning the aim — which is popping out of irrelevance into prominence — but additionally one another. I see the identical factor 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.”

(High photograph: The Harringtons on their go to to the Racecourse Floor/Joey Harrington)