When it comes to the history of Welsh football, Wrexham is a fitting place to start. The city’s stadium, The Racecourse, is where Wales played their first international home match (a 2-0 loss to Scotland; 1877), and the Football Association of Wales (FAW), the governing body of the sport in the country, was founded here in the Wynnstay Arms Hotel (which still stands today)
It’s because of this football heritage that the city is set to become the site of the Football Museum of Wales in 2025, a project I am currently helping to coordinate. The museum will be a celebration of the sport’s saga in Wales, containing exhibitions and artefacts from past and present day.
The exterior of a brown brick building. The site of the soon to become Football Museum of Wales View Credits
Then of course there’s the not-so-small fact that Wrexham AFC are the oldest football club in Wales. Their history stretches back to 1864, when the team played a match against the local fire station. This was the very dawn of football in Wales, where working men played in amateur club sides like Chirk and Druids FC, battling it out for The Welsh Cup, a competition still held today. The game spread through the north of Wales first, before arriving in the south (likely due to the popularity of rugby in the region – another of Wales’ favourite sports), with now well-known clubs like Cardiff City, Swansea City and Newport County AFC forming more than thirty years later (between 1899 and 1912).
As for the national team, things didn’t get going until 1876, when a solicitor named Llewelyn Kenrick from the Wrexham area put an advert in the newspaper to see if he could recruit players to represent Wales in an international match against Scotland. He was successful, taking a team of men that included a stonemason, miner and chimney sweep, up to Glasgow where they were hammered 4-0 by the home side. Wales went on to lose their next seven games.
These early defeats largely set the tone for the men’s international game in Wales for the next 100 or so years. With the exception of a now-near-mythical run to the quarter-finals of the 1958 World Cup (where the team narrowly lost to a Brazil side featuring a 17-year-old Pele), and a 3-1 quarter-final loss to Yugoslavia at Euro 76, Wales failed to qualify for any major tournaments, enduring a catalogue of mostly miserable campaigns punctured with a handful of excruciating ‘what if’ moments, with the team falling at the final hurdle of qualification – often in dramatic fashion.
Notable near misses include the controversial 1977 World Cup qualification match against Scotland where a Scottish player (Joe Jordan) was awarded a decisive penalty despite handling the ball, and the game against Romania in Cardiff to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, where Paul Bodin sent a penalty – which would have sealed the win for Wales – sailing over the crossbar.
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