Mark Glaubitz and Kylie Welbourne, from Traralgon, were among those who at Marvel Stadium on Friday night whose interest was sparked by the series.

“It has just been a wild ride for them,” says Glaubitz, “and we’ve been happy to watch them do it.”

Pre-season tours to Australia are typically carried out by teams at the very top of the game – Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid, Manchester United and LA Galaxy (in its David Beckham era) – have all visited. Wrexham are not in that league (yet), and without the show, it’s doubtful more than a handful of die-hard fans would have turned up to watch this game. Or, in fact, that it would have happened at all.

Wrexham won the game 3-0. Both teams had chances in the early stages before teh Welsh side got on top, the opening goal coming after a dangerous cross from fan favourite Ollie Palmer forced Victory goalkeeper Jack Duncan – who had made two good saves prior – to punch the ball into the path of Tom O’Connor, who duly finished with a delicate volley from the edge of the box.

Halftime brought wholesale changes: Victory fielded much of their youth team, who are in the middle of their NPL Victoria campaign, while Wrexham brought on the likes of captain James McClean and new signing Ryan Hardie.

The difference between the teams, from then on, was particularly stark. Hardie’s darting front-post run brought his first goal for Wrexham, getting onto the end of a Ryan Barnett cross. George Evans scored Wrexham’s third, using the Australian rules signal for goal in his celebration.

In football terms, this was little more than a training run for both sides. And as fodder for the next season of Welcome to Wrexham it might amount to a minute or two of screen time at best. But Brand Wrexham is much more than the team. As the series has made clear, it’s about a club as a focal point of a town, and a town defined by struggle, resilience and a sense of community.

Welbourne said the stories of regular people spotlighted in Welcome to Wrexham helped her develop an attachment to the club on the other side of the world.

“We got hooked,” she said. “It’s not about Rob [Mac] and Ryan [Reynolds]; it’s about the whole town of Wrexham and Wales itself.”

“It has just made celebrities out of normal, everyday people,” said Glaubitz.

A promotion brings with it extra revenue (mostly from TV broadcast deals, but also from increased attendance at games). But it costs money to get there. As O’Hanlon wrote in May, the club spent more than three times the National League average on wages when they won promotion the first time (£3.5 million versus the £1 million most of their opponents did). The wage bill in the following year rose to almost £6 million. In the season just finished, the club spent almost £11 million on player salaries, and almost £5 million on transfer fees.

There’s another cost, too: many of the players who were there at the start of this journey are now gone. Of the 31 players currently listed on the club’s website, only five pre-date the Mac-Reynold (and coach Phil Parkinson) era. Big man Ollie Palmer, seemingly discarded in January, is on tour with the team, and was in Parkinson’s starting 11 on Friday night. But fellow striker Paul Mullin – once hailed by fans as “super” and “f—ing dynamite” – has been sent out on loan to Wigan Athletic. Fan favourites Steven Fletcher and Jordan Davies are gone too.

“That’s been the hard thing,” Welbourne said, “because you get attached to certain players.”

Melbourne Victory are a team in transition too, having lost the likes of Ryan Teague and Daniel Arzani after losing the A-League grand final in late May.

If Wrexham have bought their way to success (and they have), they’ve done it on the back of their celebrity owners’ money. But they are now in the clear: the club announced in its 2024 accounts that it had repaid £15 million in loans to the Mac and Reynolds-controlled RR McReynolds Company LLC.

The English Premier League, the richest on the planet, is just one more promotion away. But in truth, simply surviving in the Championship will take some doing.

Unprecedented though the Wrexham story seems, we have been here before.

In 1976, Elton John took over as chairman of Watford Football Club, vowing to take the team to the first division (the top tier of English soccer until the formation of the Premier League in 1992-93), just as Mac vowed to take Wrexham to the Premier League back in 2021.

Two years later, Watford won the fourth division title, under the stewardship of Graham Taylor, who would go on to manage England. Over five years, the club was promoted three times, reaching the top tier at the end of the 1981-82 season.

In their first season, they briefly sat atop the league, and finished the season in second place, behind Liverpool. But by the end of the 1988-89 season, they were relegated. They have been up and down ever since, and last season finished mid-table in the Championship, the division in which Wrexham now find themselves.

The point of all that is that fairytales can happen, especially if you have the cash flow to bankroll them. But in sport and entertainment both, every dream ends eventually, and reality bites again.

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