Welcome to Wrexham Women’s Champions League campaignEmily KeoghJul 21, 2026, 03:14 AM ETClose
- Based in London, Emily Keogh is ESPN’s women’s soccer correspondent, specializing in the WSL and UWCL
Wrexham’s women will play in Europe for the first time, while it’s the first time for the club since the men’s team did in 1995. Kristian Skeie – UEFAWrexham Women have grown accustomed to making history. Over the past few years, they have rewritten the record books on several occasions, but none of those milestones compare to what awaits next week: their first venture into European football.As one of the lowest-ranked sides in the UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL) first qualifying round, the Red Dragons arrive as underdogs with another piece of history in their sights. Wrexham completed a remarkable domestic double, lifting both the Adran Trophy and the Adran Premier title for the first time in the club’s history, to secure qualification for Europe’s premier club competition.
They now face Armenian champions FC Pyunik at the men’s 13,000-capacity Racecourse Ground (STōK Cae Ras) on Wednesday, before a possible final against Northern Ireland’s Glentoran or Latvia’s Riga FC on July 25 to seal a spot in the second phase.
If they get there, Denmark’s HB Køge await on Aug. 5 in another mini-tournament that could see them progress to the final vs. either Lithuanian champions Gintra or Scotland’s Heart of Midlothian on Aug. 8. Then, and only then, would they get themselves into the two-legged third qualifying round to fight for a place in the UWCL League Phase with Europe’s biggest fish.
Wrexham’s women are used to doing things the hard way, though. The team were formed in 1993 and only reached the top Welsh flight two years ago, so it has taken several painstaking seasons, setbacks and crushing defeats to get here. But now with the backing of a Hollywood ownership group including superstars Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac, who have been determined to make the club a household name since their takeover in 2020, and their first silverware in the trophy cabinet, this feels like the beginning of a new chapter.
A new name on the trophy
Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac celebrate the women’s team promotion with them, alongside the men’s team, in 2023. Jan Kruger/Getty ImagesThe foundations had been laid when Wrexham sealed an historic promotion to the Adran Premier in 2023-24. That summer they became the first Welsh women’s club to operate on a semi-professional basis, before finishing third in their first top-flight season. Former General Manager Gemma Owen told ESPN at the time: “Usually teams that go up a division tend to struggle, and I don’t think we did that. I thought we really made a statement of intent that we’re here, we’re not here to mess around, we’re here to compete, which we did.”They even reached the final of the FAW Women’s Cup, but defeat to Cardiff City became a theme as Wrexham fell to their rivals in the cup final again the following season, then finished fourth, 12 points behind the champions, in the Adran Premier league.Editor’s Picks
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After four seasons at the helm, manager Steve Dale resigned and was replaced by former Leicester manager Jenny Sugarman in July 2025. But “chaos” was the first word Sugarman used to describe the club she inherited last summer.
Only one Wrexham player was under contract, while around 20 other former players and trialists were waiting to discover their futures. A planned pre-season tour of Florida was cancelled, preparations for the new campaign were behind schedule as the team didn’t even have a kit and facilities manager, so Sugarman gave herself two weeks to meet the squad and make the difficult decisions about who would form the basis of her new-look team.
“Arriving into that was highly challenging and not something I would recommend to other people. If they can avoid it, they should,” Sugarman tells ESPN. “I had a good idea of what I was stepping into … but until you’re actually in it, and you see it, and you get to the training ground and there’s no power so there’s no lights for the toilets…
“I brought a player in on trial and had to do her medical on a bed outside; we had to do that in the rain because we couldn’t get in the building because it was pitch black.”
The disruption did not end there. Wrexham made history to become the first club — and still one of only a handful worldwide — to own their women’s stadium outright when purchasing their 3,000 capacity stadium “The Rock” in August 2025. And midway through the 2025-26 campaign, work began on a redevelopment of the site to create a high-performance facility designed to support the women’s programme.
Take a look back at some of the best images of the weekend, as we lifted the Adran Premier for the first time in our history 📸
🔴⚪️ #WxmAFC
— Wrexham AFC Women (@WrexhamAFCWomen) April 7, 2026
“We look back and laugh at times when you’re sitting having team meetings with stud walls, with dust all over the place, and drills going on in the background,” Wrexham technical director Mark Swales tells ESPN. “No job is too big; no job’s too small. Everyone rolls their sleeves up and we just crack on and do what we need to do to succeed.
“I think that is something that the players will look back on — the times where we were in the chaos — and they still managed to continue the momentum and build on what we achieved at the end of the season.”
In February, Wrexham broke new ground again by becoming the first Adran Premier side to pay a transfer fee to a domestic rival, signing versatile Wales defender Maria Francis-Jones, 22, from The New Saints. And incredibly, amid all the chaos, Wrexham finally defeated Cardiff in the Adran Trophy final before going on to secure their first Adran Premier title by four points in the Championship conference, ending years of frustration.
For Sugarman, overcoming that psychological barrier proved just as important as the silverware itself.
“When we looked around the group partway through the season and we spoke about winning, we didn’t have a huge number of winners in the changing room,” Sugarman says. “There was some, there was probably less than 50% of staff and players had actually won a major trophy.
“It wasn’t just about being the best, it was about being able to overcome, deal with the transition from being a massive underdog and nobody expecting you to even be in a conversation potentially yourselves as well.”
Twelve months on from their decision to start afresh, Wrexham have been transformed from perennial challengers into champions. And a place in the UWCL qualifiers is their reward.
Wrexham completed a remarkable domestic double, lifting both the Adran Trophy and the Adran Premier title for the first time in the club’s history. Gemma Thomas/Wrexham AFCEuropean underdogsWrexham head into the UWCL as one of the lowest-ranked teams in the draw, attempting to achieve something no Welsh club has managed in years.”The Champions League is the pinnacle of club football,” Sugarman says. “That’s where you go to test yourself against the best. I don’t care if we are qualifying as one of the lowest-ranked team sin the competition, or if we are the defending champions, Champions League is Champions League.”The scale of their task is reflected in the history books. No club from the Welsh top flight have ever progressed beyond the first qualifying round of the Champions League. Indeed, the last Welsh side to win a qualifier was Cardiff Met in 2019, while it has been five years since an Adran Premier club even scored in the competition — Swansea City’s Chloe Chivers was the last to do so, in extra time of a 4-1 defeat to CSKA Moscow in 2021.Despite that, Sugarman is keen for her players to embrace the occasion rather than shy away from it. Taking inspiration from the United States Navy SEALs and their mantra of ‘We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training’ (which was adapted from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus), the coach is excited to get going.”The adrenaline, confidence and the belief that everybody will be able to gain from that feeling is not something that we should be afraid of, or try to push to the side,” she says.Disney+ becomes new home of Women’s Champions League in EuropeDisney+ will be the only place football fans can watch all 75 matches live each season. Visit the Disney+ website to get access.
But preparing for Europe has presented Wrexham with another challenge entirely. Managing the physical demands of training while reducing injury risk is one part of the equation; gathering reliable information on unfamiliar opponents is another. Women’s football in Wales has no access to video analysis, making preparation difficult. And that challenge is amplified against an opponent such as Armenian champions FC Pyunik, where little recent footage is available.
Instead, Wrexham’s staff have been forced to analyze matches from more than a year ago in Pyunik’s last set of qualifying games. Yet while Pyunik have retained much of the same squad and coaching staff, they also completed a perfect domestic season, winning all 18 league matches, leaving significant uncertainty over how accurately that footage reflects the team Wrexham will face on Wednesday.
“We want to embrace the opportunity,” Sugarman adds. “We’ve mentioned, ‘no bones about it, we are here to try and win some games. We want to progress.’ We believe we’ve built a squad of people that can do that, but it also comes down to the day, doesn’t it? And there’s fine lines in football.”
Sugarman recalls that she got some funny looks during a meeting when she stated that her ambition was to “win in the Champions League.”
“Everyone missed the ‘IN’ bit and looked at me like I’m crazy and mentioned, ‘You want to win the Champions League???’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no. I want to win IN the Champions League’,” she says.
“It can’t just be about winning some matches in Europe, but that’s a really good place to start because everybody loves winning, and I hate losing. So we would like to win, we’d like to progress, we’d like to continue this European journey this season, but certainly [we’re aware] of being the lowest-ranked team in the competition and the fact that we’ve never competed in it before.”
Building a legacy
Jenny Sugarman is keen to ensure that Wrexham are thinking about the future. Gemma Thomas/Wrexham AFCWinning trophies has always been the end goal for Wrexham, but something even more important has been an undercurrent of the motivation for the squad. Early in the season, the squad developed a set of core values to shape the team’s identity and one theme stood above the rest: legacy.For Wrexham, success was never meant to be measured solely by trophies and accolades, but by leaving the club stronger than before. That philosophy is not new. Former captain Keren Allen who retired in May, told ESPN in 2025 about “leaving the shirt in a better place than they found it,” showing that despite a squad overhaul, a new manager and a changing identity, the club’s core values have endured.”History and that community connection can actually weigh heavy,” Sugarman says. “And it’s important that whoever walks in the door to represent us is one, aware of who they’re representing and the people that they’re representing and the story of the club.”While the last five years under Hollywood co-owners Reynolds and Mac have transformed Wrexham’s global profile, the club’s history stretches back to 1864. And Sugarman believes that balancing tradition with rapid growth is one of the defining challenges facing the women’s team.”One of the cool things about where we are now, and we may never be here again, is that we are in this difficult-to-manage section of growth where you’ve got players who have been on the journey from day one … but also have a full-time job as a teacher or whatever outside of that,” she says. “And then full-time pros and full-time staff who are on this journey to 1) develop and grow themselves, but 2) make this team something that people can be proud of and be the best.”So we go with what Rob Mac says, and he says he wants the best women’s team in the world. But that’s massive and that’s miles away. So how do we do what we can to keep progressing?”
For now, Wrexham are not trying to challenge the likes of Barcelona or Chelsea overnight. The club remain semi-professional, with no verified timetable to turn fully professional. Instead, the focus is on sustainable growth rather than rapid expansion.
Yet that ambition to become “the best” still shapes the club’s direction. For Sugarman, it begins with setting the benchmark in Wales before thinking any further afield.
“We want to continually now be the best team in Wales,” she says. “We want to set the standards, we want to drive the standards. We want to raise the standards for Welsh women’s football for girls of the future that are coming through — whether that’s the quality of football on the pitch, the medical support that they get around it, the performance support that they get, the opportunity to have a dual career or to become a professional footballer. Those are sorts of things that we would see as ambitions and targets and success down the line.”
Swales believes that a better measurement for growth is ensuring the future of the next generation.
Champions League football is coming to the Racecourse!
Wrexham AFC Women are delighted to announce that our UEFA Women’s Champions League mini tournament will be hosted at the Racecourse Ground.
Ticket details along with kick-off times will be unveiled shortly.
🔴⚪️ #WxmAFC
— Wrexham AFC Women (@WrexhamAFCWomen) June 23, 2026
“We want to be this sort of nucleus for the growth of the game in Wales as well. We’re not trying to jump from zero to 100 overnight,” he says. “We are trying to build an infrastructure that is competitive, is growing, building on something that is already there so that when the new season comes, we’re in a much better place than where we were last year. When we finish this season coming, we’ll be thinking about what does year three, year four, year five, look like so that we can be really invested for the staff, for the players, the fans.”
With there being no real pathway for young girls to play football in Wales, with no competitive academy outfits comparable to those in England, there is a key focus in ensuring that the next generation are able to develop. And the opportunity to host UWCL qualifying games at home will be key to inspiring the next wave of Red Dragons.
Wednesday’s game against Pyunik will be streamed live via Wrexham’s channels making it accessible to international and fans who can’t make it to the stadium in person, as the club aim reach as many people as possible.
“It was important for the club to host this if we could, because there is that history in the story that is 30 years since I think the last European game at the Racecourse Ground [against Romanian side Petrolul Ploieşti in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1995],” Swales says. “We’re very passionate about bringing that back to the club and to be the women’s team to do that, it just signifies how the world has changed and the opportunities that are there for everybody moving forwards.”
For a team that has made a habit of breaking new ground, there couldn’t be a more fitting next chapter.
