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Another week, another series of world-expanding episodes. This one is full of really impressive surprises. Did you know that Wrexham AFC encompasses not just the well-covered men’s team but a wheelchair team, teams for children starting at age six, and, most importantly, a women’s team on the verge of going pro? Buckle in, this is a fun one.
Midway-ish through the season, the men’s side are in a viable, fierce fight to take and maintain the top spot in their league. That’s a great accomplishment, but it can’t hold a candle to the performance of the women’s side, who are undefeated in their league, Adran North. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, as Rob says, they’re “kicking the living shit out of everyone” else. The players are on a roll, playing beautifully and generously, all of which is very good. What makes them great and pretty deadly is their scorer, a tiny, zippy, frankly terrifying goal-making machine named Rosie Hughes.
Rosie is the top scorer in the entire club, easily outshining every player on the men’s side, and burnishing her reputation as a role model for local aspiring scorers. An awed Mark Griffiths (who turns out to provide commentary for the women’s side as well as the men’s; when does he sleep?) describes Rosie as having superb touch and control of the ball, the ability to play well on even the worst pitch, summit it all up with “she’s ludicrous,” and the scoring montages sprinkled throughout “Ballers” make it hard to disagree.
Rosie herself is very clear-eyed about her role, describing herself on the pitch as “I’m a nuisance, I’m a pain, defenders do not want to defend me.” She’s relentless but also joyful, reflecting, “When I’m on the pitch, a fire within me kind of explodes. I look like I’m laughing in the opponents’ faces, but I’m not; I’m just happy for me.” Her need for speed, to just get out there and go, is of a piece with her previous self-description as a person who became a prison guard because she couldn’t stand the thought of spending eight hours a day in an office. She knows herself, and the kind of life she wants, and she’s clearly gone for it. As befits a player of such staggering talent and ambition, she thinks of Paul Mullin as “the male Rosie Hughes.” Claim it, Rosie!
For all that excellence and peak performance, for the character and uplifting confidence Team Manager Steve Dale praises, Rosie Hughes is paid exactly £0. Converted to U.S. dollars using the conversion formula current as of this writing, that works out to $0. That’s right! Blood, sweat, mud, teamwork, pitch management, performance: all for free.
That’s because Adran North is an amateur league. None of the players at that level are paid for their excellence, which makes promotion so necessary. While the men’s side needs to get promoted to make their efforts financially sustainable, the women’s side needs to do so to get paid at all. Humphrey’s helpful explanation of how promotion would work for the women’s team breaks it all down: even if they win their league, Adran North, promotion to Adran Premier isn’t assured unless and until they defeat their counterparts in Adran South.
To be clear, everyone who works at the Club is enthusiastically on board with paying the players and providing them with more financial resources to enhance their performance. After attending an invigorating winning game, Rob notes the need for massive improvements to their pitch, which drains poorly and is often quite muddy. Both he and Ryan consider prioritizing the women’s team as a moral obligation and a huge business opportunity. There’s tons of money to be made from having two winning sides, especially now, when women’s football is in ascendance.
Humphrey explains the disappointing but all too familiar history of women’s football in the U.K., which suffered from — drumroll, please! — male fragility and institutionalized sexism. From the 1880s to about 1920, women’s football was very popular and even got a boost during World War I because so many men who would have been playing were off in the trenches. The sport maintained its popularity even after the war, as Humphrey notes that 53,000 people attended a Boxing Day match in 1920, a one-day attendance that Wrexham AFC “can only dream of today.” In 1921, however, the Football Association deemed women’s football “a threat to the men’s game” and issued a statement saying “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” That was the end of organized women’s football until the 1970s, and nothing of note moved forward until 1993 when a Football Council for the women’s game was finally established. Thirty years later, women’s football is once again very popular, commanding an attendance of close to 100,000 at major matches.
The remainder of “Ballers” is devoted to introducing us to more of the players, many of whom were introduced to the game by their fathers. There’s Mia Roberts, whose dad is former Wrexham AFC Men’s captain Neil “Robbo” Roberts. Sadly, his career as a footballer ended on a dismal note, as his captaincy overlapped with the team’s relegation slide to the National League, but those days are now far enough in his rearview that he enjoys participating in what looks like a Supporters’ Association event honoring legendary players of the past. (Mia attended and was honored at the event, too. There’s a sweet couple of seconds where we see them sitting side-by-side and signing memorabilia for fans.)
Lili Jones is another featured player. Like Mia, she grew up in Wrexham in a passionately Red Dragons-supporting family. Her late father, Gareth, encouraged her talent, signing her up to play for the boys’ teams when she was 5 or 6 years old and cheering her on to play for Everton (a Premier League club in Liverpool) and then for an international traveling team. Lili returned home to Wrexham following her father’s death by suicide in 2021. Her emotional fortitude is staggering; for a 17-year-old to speak with such poise and candidness about the sudden death of a parent and then to go on to say that she feels him watching her play even now … well. Anyone with dry eyes at this point is made of impressively stern stuff. Living back at home, attending high school, scrubbing dishes for two six-hour shifts at a local pub each week, and then attending training sessions and playing in matches sounds grueling, but Lili seems to take it all in stride. It’s clear that playing for Wrexham is a huge boon to her mental health; as she puts it, “I live and breathe for playing football.”
The last person profiled is Gemma Owens, a Wrexham girl to her toes, who is now the Director of Women’s Football Operations. Rob and Ryan can’t say enough about Gemma — Rob describes her as “the beating heart of the entire club,” and Ryan notes that her sterling work and influence reverberate through the men’s team, as well. She oversees the development and management of all 13 teams that girls and women play for in Wrexham and describes working for the team as “an absolute dream.” It’s thoroughly woven into her life outside of work, as well — Gemma’s husband, Gareth is a retired Wrexham player who now manages the Under 19s women’s team. Mia Roberts neatly sums up Gemma’s contributions by saying, “North Wales can thank Gemma Owen for how big women’s football is here.”
The entire squad is identified in one of several montages of them laying waste to every other team in the league, but we don’t get details about all of them. I’m guessing that since this episode concludes with the women’s team wrapping up their 2023 regular season at the top of the table for Adran North, we may get to know them better in a later episode devoted to their fate-determining postseason match against the winners of Adran South, where promotion to the Adran Premier League hangs in the balance. I’m looking forward to seeing more of the exceptional teamwork from forward Amber Lightfoot, captain Kim Dutton, defender Erin Lovett, and goalkeeper Delyth Morgan later in the season.
In the meantime, as Manager Steve Dale puts it, “We fuckin’ enjoy it right now, Sunday, we win the fuckin’ league and get everything we fuckin’ deserve.” Parky isn’t the only enthusiastic coach in town! The celebrations include players running around doing airplanes, hugging each other, hugging their families, kissing their partners, getting photos taken with fans, and hearing little superfans singing “Super Rosie Hughes.”
Their 11-1 triumph over Rhyl in their final regular season game prompts Humphrey to observe that while many wax rhapsodic about Brazil’s run in the 1970s when thinking of the Beautiful Game, they’ve got to see Wrexham Women’s team in 2023. Lili, overjoyed with the end of their season and wrapped in a flag honoring her late father, sums it up beautifully: “Playing for this badge, for this club, and winning it for these people is something that I’ve always dreamed of doing.” Go on, girls, enjoy your traditional locker room scream-singalong of “Angels”; you’ve more than earned it.
• One can see why it was such a big deal for Jess Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) and Jules Paxton (Keira Knightley) to be passionately into football and for their parents to be somewhere between baffled and horrified about it in Bend It Like Beckham in 2002. The stink of something like “quite unsuitable for females” takes a long time to wash off, and just nine years after the FA established a Women’s Football Council, it seems like there wasn’t much infrastructure to support girls and women’s teams.
• This video of Lili and Gareth watching a men’s team game is so cute and heartbreaking; they’re even singing “It’s Always Sunny In Wrexham” by beloved Band of Dads DECLAN SWAN.
• Most episodes include a bit of Mark Griffiths’ game commentary, and for those who’d like to hear more, the Wrexham Wrecaps YouTube channel is here to help. This video captures the thrills of Wrexham AFC Women’s victory over Connah’s Quay at the Racecourse this past March.