Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds Are ‘Honoring’ Wrexham’s Coal Mines With New Football Club Stadium
Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds are putting Wrexham’s coal mining industry at the forefront when designing a new stadium for the Wrexham football club.
“It was always in the plans when we were working with the local architects and engineers about the design of the new cop (stadium),” McElhenney, 46, shared during the Tuesday, October 14, episode of Welcome to Wrexham. “We wanted to make sure we were honoring the coal mining industry in any way that we could.”
He added, “We wanted to find ways in which we could just be pretty overt with our respect.”
The tenth episode of Welcome to Wrexham season 2 introduced viewers to the 1934 Gresford Colliery Disaster, where an underground explosion killed 266 miners.
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Located near the Wrexham AFC racecourse is Wrexham’s Miners Rescue Station, which is home to the memorial for all the lives lost in the disaster. During the episode, McElhenney took his father to see the memorial, which was built in 1982.
One part of the memorial that McElhenney and Reynolds hope to incorporate into Wrexham’s new stadium is an abandoned colliery wheel.
Earlier in Welcome to Wrexham’s second season, McElhenney and Reynolds revealed their plans to expand the football stadium. In the premiere episode, which aired last month, the duo said they needed ￡20 million (which converts to $25.5 million) in order to complete the new racecourse.
Humphrey Ker, the executive director of Wrexham AFC, previously explained that the stadium project is the “biggest and most expensive piece” of owning a football team. However, as McElhenney and Reynolds are hoping that Wrexham gets promoted to the English Football League, they are in need “more seats to get a stadium international standard to bring Welsh football back to the racecourse,” Ker explained.
Spoiler alert — for the first time in 15 years, Wrexham was promoted to the English Football League this past April. The events are set to be showcased as Welcome to Wrexham season 2 comes to an end.
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While the first of two episodes released on Tuesday focused on the history of Wrexham’s mining industry, the second followed the Wrexham Women’s Football Club as they made history.
The women’s team was granted a Tier 1 license in March in hopes of being promoted to a semi-professional team.
“I would like to thank and congratulate our Head of Women’s Football, Gemma Owen, and colleagues [for] their hard work in ensuring we were granted a Tier 1 license,” Wrexham CEO Fleur Robinson shared at the time. “We know we still have one very big game to go in our ambition to be a Genero Adran Premier team, and we are all eagerly looking forward to next month’s play-off match against Briton Ferry Llansawel.”
The women’s team beat Briton Ferry Llansawel team 1 to 0 in April and was promoted into the Genero Adran Premier League. They are now considered a semi-professional team.
New episodes of Welcome to Wrexham premiere Tuesdays on FX.