Wrexham striker Paul Mullin has lifted the lid on the squad’s post-season trip to Las Vegas and how events weren’t how they appeared in the tabloids.
However, the team were treated to a four-day trip to Sin City by owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney after clinching a historic return to the Football League after 15 years in the fifth tier.
But there was a slight dampener on proceedings when photos appeared in the UK press, showing the squad partying with bikini-clad women.
Writing in his autobiography, My Wrexham Story, Mullin explained. “That day we were off to another pool party, this time at the Marquee club.
“Initially the atmosphere was subdued.
“The Daily Mail had published a bunch of photos of the previous day’s pool party with a load of bikini-clad girls in the background.
“There was nothing in any of it.
“Places like that obviously bring in girls as a way of promoting themselves.
“We hadn’t even spoken to them.
“There were other pictures of us messing about, throwing each other in the pool, stuff like that.
“We were just enjoying ourselves – a bunch of players celebrating a mad year.
“But somehow the pictures made it look like we were really pissed up and getting a bit out of hand.
“We weren’t naive.
“Also, we knew there’d be papers trying to get pictures, trying to catch us out.
“Although it’s crazy when you think about it.
Attitude
“We were a team from the National League celebrating promotion, not One Direction on a world tour.
“The tabloid press is notorious.
“But I’ll never understand an attitude where someone from a newspaper wants to create problems that don’t exist.
“We actually talked about it – how the girls in our lives had never signed up for any of the attention that follows us around.
“It must be so hard for them at times.
“OK, maybe when they got with a footballer they might have expected us to get somewhere one day, but not to have to see nonsense like that.
“They didn’t think they’d be opening a newspaper and seeing their partners’ faces on a double-page spread of ‘exclusive’ pictures from a pool party in Las Vegas with all the suggestion that contained.”
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However, if they didn’t already know it, the Wrexham squad learned that life under Hollywood ownership had brought an entirely new level of exposure.
But, as Mullin reveals, the dressing room at the Racecourse Ground seems to have its feet on the ground and well able to handle the less savoury elements of the club’s remarkable rise.
