Why Wrexham will head to Australia and New Zealand rather than the U.S. in pre-season

Wrexham will head Down Under for the first time in pre-season as the club owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney play three games in Australia and New Zealand.

After touring the USA and Canada in the previous two summers, Phil Parkinson’s promotion winners will visit Melbourne, Sydney and Wellington in July as part of their preparations for the step up to the Championship.

A combination of the Welsh club not knowing until the penultimate weekend of the season when 2025-26 would kick-off — League One starts on August 2, a week before the Championship — and the revamped FIFA Club World Cup being played across the United States helps explain why Wrexham won’t return to north America in 2025.

Welcome to Wrexham, the documentary charting the ownership of the Hollywood duo, is also popular in Australia and New Zealand so the trip is seen by club officials as a prime opportunity to further build an international audience.

Melbourne Victory are first up for Wrexham at the 53,000 capacity Marvel Stadium on Friday, July 11, followed four days later by a clash with Sydney FC at the Allianz Stadium. The travelling party will then move on to New Zealand and a Saturday, July 19 meeting with Wellington Phoenix at Sky Stadium.

Parkinson’s squad will then make the near-12,000-mile return journey to the UK to continue their preparations for the club’s first season in the second tier for 43 years.

Unlike last year, when the women’s team played three matches in the United States as part of the ‘Wrex Coast Tour’, this time around it is just the men who will be flying to Australia and New Zealand.

Tickets go on general sale via Ticketek in Australia and New Zealand on Friday, May 16 at 9am AEST and 11am NZST.

So, what’s the lowdown on Wrexham’s first trip Down Under?

When do Wrexham fly out? 

The first game is on July 11 (kick-off 7.30pm AEST), the earliest start date yet for an overseas tour under the current regime. Then come Sydney FC on Tuesday, July 15, kick-off 7.30pm AEST.

Parkinson’s side will fly home straight after the Wellington game on July 19 (kick-off 5pm), meaning they are likely to arrive back in the UK on July 21. This will then give the squad a little under three weeks to step up preparations for the new EFL season, a much bigger window than 2023 (six days) and last year (12 days).

Part of this is by design, in that lessons were learned from the first tour with the short gap felt to be a factor in Wrexham’s sluggish start to their first season back in the League. Flying home from a successful tour finale in Vancouver last year with a decent time lag before the season began was seen as ideal.

But it’s also a consequence of the EFL breaking with convention this year to split the start dates for Leagues One and Two, and the Championship. With Wrexham chasing promotion as the 2025 pre-season arrangements were being thrashed out in the early months of the year, it meant having to err on the side of caution and plan for a League One start date of August 2.

These dates were then set in stone and could not be changed, even after promotion was sealed with victory over Charlton Athletic on April 26.

Is the uncertainty over start dates for the EFL 2025-26 season why there will be no visit to North America this year?

Partly, yes. Wrexham wanting to be back in the UK a minimum 12 or 13 days before the scheduled start of the League One season meant any tour to the States would have clashed with the revamped FIFA Club World Cup.

The final of a competition featuring many of the globe’s biggest clubs takes place on July 13 at the MetLife Stadium in New York. In total, there will be 63 games played across 12 U.S. venues in the Club World Cup with the contingent of competing European teams including Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Inter, Chelsea and Manchester City. Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami kick things off on June 13 against Al Ahly in Miami.

Going up against such a behemoth of a tournament being played in the same country would not have been easy. Just as importantly, the Club World Cup meant finding suitable opposition on a par with previous years — Wrexham have twice played Chelsea in the U.S. and Manchester United once — would have been almost impossible, especially with any Premier League teams not involved in the Club World Cup likely to be just a week or so into pre-season back home when Wrexham are free.

With the English top flight due to start on August 16, any tour plans involving the big boys will be geared towards the end of July rather than the middle of the month.

So, why Australia and New Zealand?

Demand. Welcome to Wrexham has a strong audience Down Under, meaning there’s a potentially lucrative market to tap into.

As the most recently released accounts make clear, Wrexham’s rise through the leagues is increasingly being funded by revenue generated from outside the UK. In those 2023-24 figures, 52.5 per cent of the club’s £26.7 total income came from overseas.

The biggest contributor to that sum by far was North America, though Australia and New Zealand did help, along with the European market.

Judging by how rumours of a possible summer visit to Melbourne from Wrexham made the national news bulletins in Australia last month, the trip is likely to create plenty of interest even though it’ll be up against the British and Irish Lions tour.

An estimated 40,000 rugby union fans are expected to follow the Lions across their six-week tour of Australia. Happily, however, for those following Wrexham, their path will not necessarily cross those backing the Lions, who play in Adelaide on July 12 and Brisbane on July 19. This should prevent hotel prices from soaring too high.

Are we anticipating a big swelling of club coffers as a result of this first foray Down Under?

Wrexham expect to make a small profit, just as they did with the 2023 and 2024 tours to the U.S. But, the true commercial value is likely to lay down the line, as the club taps into another significant English-speaking market by building a support base.

It’s a two-way street, too, with Wrexham proving good for local business on those two previous tours to North America, a leading tourist official putting the boost to the North Carolina economy from the 2023 sell-out Chelsea clash in Chapel Hill at £15.3 million ($20 m).

What can the Wrexham players expect?

Well, it seems unlikely that training will be conducted in temperatures on a par with the baking conditions in the States, particularly on the West Coast when pitchside thermometers last summer hovered around the 30-degree Celsius mark.

Average July temperatures in Melbourne are around half that and even lower in Wellington at 12 degrees Celsius. Sydney is slightly warmer at 17 degrees Celsius on average but this is the winter Down Under so anyone, say, fancying a dip on Bondi Beach might find it a tad chilly.

Otherwise, the facilities are expected to be similar to what the squad has become accustomed to on these pre-season trips. Last year, Wrexham were based at UCLA (University of California) when playing friendlies in Santa Clara and Santa Barbara, whereas in 2023 the players had also been hugely impressed by the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Lessons learned in 2023 — when Wrexham flew from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back again — means travelling time once arrived in Australia will be limited. Flights between Melbourne and Sydney typically come in at 80 minutes, while it’s another three and a half hours from New South Wales to the New Zealand capital.

The travelling party is expected to touch down four or so days before the Melbourne opener on July 12.

As for the opposition, there’s no doubt the benefits that came with facing Premier League teams in the U.S., even when losing 5-0 to Chelsea in 2023. This time around, it’s solely A-League clubs who have been lined up.

Melbourne, Sydney and Wellington all compete in the top flight but the domestic season runs from October to May so it’ll be interesting to see the make-up of the respective teams.

How will the trip fit into Wrexham’s overall pre-season programme?

There’ll have to be a slight tweak compared to what worked very well last summer, caused by that earlier arrival back in the UK.

Where in 2024 Wrexham played just one warm-up friendly after returning from Vancouver — a 1-0 win over Fleetwood Town — maybe this time there will be a couple, more than likely away from home due to the new £1.7m pitch needing time to bed in before the season proper starts on August 8/9/10.

Parkinson also found the pre-U.S. friendly against non-League Hanley Town a useful exercise so expect something similar again before the players jet out to Australia. Otherwise, though, it’ll very much be business as usual with everything geared towards that season opener.

What do Wrexham’s co-owners have to say?

In a joint statement, Reynolds and McElhenney said: “From the very beginning, we wanted to make Wrexham a globally-recognised team, town and brand. We could not be more excited to bring the Red Dragons to Australia and New Zealand, and we are particularly proud that this announcement features neither a Men at Work or Hugh Jackman joke.

“The latter of which took maturity and tremendous restraint. We’re proud of Ryan. Of course, we make no promises going forward.”

(Top photo: Robbie Jay Barratt/Getty Images)