An £18 million grant being given to Wrexham to help build the Kop has been twisted into the most ludicrous of news stories.

It’s easily twisted into cheap clickbait: “Millionaire Hollywood Stars Take Tax Payers’ Money for Vanity Project.”

Nonsense.

There is a scandal here, but it’s not the award of the grant: it’s how rare it is that public money is spent on North Wales.

If anybody can explain why we should not be able to raise funds in the same way as every other club, simply because we have wealthy owners, is beyond me. Everyone else is entitled to apply for grants; that’s how football stands and stadiums get built. Why can’t we?

Our owners’ wealth is irrelevant. The days of local businesspeople running the football club are long gone. Perhaps that’s a shame, but it’s a fact. Are we supposed to put ourselves at a disadvantage because of our owners’ identities?

It’s not as if they’re the wealthiest owners in British football, anyway. As we’ve seen recently, Premier League clubs have become so valuable that it’s essentially impossible for an individual, even a hyper-wealthy one, to buy one outright. It takes a consortium to execute such a purchase these days.

This isn’t always reflected in public perception, Todd Boehly is seen as the owner of Chelsea, but it’s only because people naturally want a face to identify with a club. They’re owned by the Clearwater consortium, of which he is merely the most prominent member.

Looking closer to home, the most prominent members of Birmingham City’s ownership group, Tom Brady and Tom Wagner, are estimated to have a personal wealth which is six times greater than that of Rob and Ryan combined. A subsidiary of Knighthead Capital, the investment firm Wagner co-founded, owns City. It handles assets estimated to be worth $9 billion.

The big difference between Rob, Ryan and the Allyns and the super-wealthy club owners we are up against is that they are committed to building the club as part of an over-arching plan to support our community. How many others have the good of the region on their agenda?

Let’s be clear: the funding is coming our way because the new Kop will be part of the Wrexham Gateway project. The club’s incredible growth is a unique opportunity for the city to be ambitious, and the knock-on effect of consolidating our progress by improving the infrastructure around and within the ground can only benefit all of us.

That’s why we’ve succeeded in getting funding; it’s not dissimilar to Manchester United’s model for building the new Old Trafford, a £2 billion project which will only go ahead because the government are heavily investing in the stadium’s hinterland to rejuvenate the area. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to do that?

While I’m at it, don’t forget that West Ham and Manchester City were essentially gifted stadiums built with public money. And the club will be putting a substantial amount of money into the Racecourse’s redevelopment. If you believed what uninformed sources are claiming, you’d think the grant is funding the whole thing.

The real headline about the funding we are receiving for the Kop project is very different. The truly remarkable aspect of the deal is that North Wales is finally getting some funding!

You don’t need me to tell you about the imbalance between north and south when it comes to the Welsh Assembly’s priorities. It extends well beyond sport: politically, Cardiff feels a long way away.

Maybe that’s because the discrepancy between transport infrastructure in the north and the south is so vast. In May it was announced that a £2.1 billion investment in North Wales would revolutionise our train system, finally delivering a Metro-style network which has been talked about for years.

However, in announcing it the Welsh Government only committed to funding £13 million of the overall spend, with no indication from Westminster that they would pick up the rather considerable shortfall.

Meanwhile, £140 million has been signed sealed and delivered to refurbish Cardiff Central. That’s in addition to the £1 billion of public money which has been poured into electrifying the railways in south-east Wales by Transport for Wales, which completes early next month. They’re then going to build five new stations between Cardiff and England.

Meanwhile, campaigns to reintroduce a rail link between south-west and north-west Wales continue. A direct line between the two regions last existed in the 1960s, but in 2021 Transport for Wales said it was unfeasible.

Do you see my point? When I went down to Pontypridd to watch Wrexham play in the Adran Premier, I was impressed by how pleasant the town was. It felt like there’d been a lot of investment in what has always been portrayed as a place in post-industrial decline, and a swift look at the public funding it has received this century confirmed my impression.

The railway station was one of five which shared a £39 million grant in 2014, and the following year it got a further grant of £24 million to complete its renovation. On top of this, minutes from Pontypridd Council in 2021 showed they received over £95 million in public funding for various projects improving the town centre. That includes over £5 million in levelling-up funding.

That’s the funding we applied for to execute the Wrexham Gateway project: we were rejected, and the supposedly controversial Kop grant partly makes up that shortfall.

North Wales doesn’t enjoy the sort of largesse slathered on the south, and when we do get something, it’s immediately a bone of contention.

Frankly, if it wasn’t for Rob and Ryan you get the impression that Cardiff would still be paying no attention to us. Not only have they put us on the map, they’ve done a heck of a lot more for Wrexham than the people who are supposed to have our backs.

The Wrexham Gateway is a transformative project which will deliver a massive boost to the city. It’s the sort of scheme which is remarkably ambitious in the context of North Wales, but commonplace in the south. Yet supposedly it’s a disgrace that, for once, we get something pushed our way.

If it happens because our owners are celebrities, that’s not a comment on them or us. It’s a comment on what it takes to get people to pay attention to us.