da bet7： Prolific striker Paul Mullin has become a “franchise player” for Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney at Wrexham, says Humphrey Ker.

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Prolific frontman joined Red Dragons in 2021Helped to fire club to promotion into EFLNow a hero for ever-growing fan baseWHAT HAPPENED?

The 29-year-old frontman was one of the first marquee signings to be snapped up by the Red Dragons following the arrival of two Hollywood superstars as co-chairmen in 2021. The Welsh outfit were able to lure Mullin back towards his Merseyside roots despite being a National League side at the time. He has become a talismanic presence for Phil Parkinson’s side – earning him legend status within the club’s fan base and a standing akin to that enjoyed by leading lights within the world of American sport.

AdvertisementGettyWHAT KER SAID ABOUT MULLIN

Executive director Ker has told the podcast of Mullin: “Paul has an unbelievable mentality. It’s a thing you hear about so much in football – this guy has a fantastic mentality. He truly is someone that just wants to win, wants to score goals and is personally affronted if either of those things don’t happen. These are all qualities that we learned about subsequently. Initially it was all statistically, look at what he’s doing and scoring all these goals for Cambridge. If we can get League Two’s top goalscorer to drop down into the National League, that’s a huge result. It just mathematically seemed to make sense. What we have learned subsequently is that he embodies and is the perfect example of, they have a term in American sport of ‘franchise player’. That is sort of what he is. Our fans worship him. He is cut from very similar cloth to Wrexham fans – he shares a lot of the same philosophies, politics, same everything, and he just wants to win for them. They worship him for it and it is a classic talismanic football hero-fan relationship.”

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Mullin helped to fire Wrexham back into the Football League last season – with records smashed along the way – but Ker has said of the embarrassing reason why he was unable to enjoy the celebrations that accompanied that achievement: “Relief was a big sentiment last season because we were in such a life or death struggle with Notts County. Every time we won, rather than celebrating it, you were like ‘thank god we didn’t drop points’. There was a huge dose of that. There was a huge dose of elation, of pride, of a sense of belonging. I reference this thing of being a plastic Liverpool fan and I often fall foul of that thing like ‘we won the Champions League’. People are like: ‘We? Were you playing? Were you part of the whole thing?’ I paid my membership, I’m a member of the club, but I always felt like a bit of an imposter being a Liverpool fan. My credentials are as good as anyone else’s, other than I was born in the catchment area of Reading FC, rather than Liverpool FC. That night to feel part of it, to share that with Rob, with Ryan, with Shaun [Harvey], with my wife – who had come over for the game, which was amazing – really was something so, so special.

“My abiding memory of that night, I’m afraid to say, is that I had unbelievably bad BO. It was quite a hot day and quite a cold evening, strangely. I had been running around, stressing and I’d put a load of coats on for the game. Went for the celebrations on the pitch and then all of the players and their families, club staff and everybody went up and crammed into one of the hospitality suites. We got the sound system from the dressing room brought in there. People were dancing on tables and it was all glorious mayhem. I sort of snuck in, took my coat off and was like ‘oh my god, what is that?’ I asked my wife, who is normally the world’s loveliest and most supportive person and would normally say ‘no, you’re alright’ and she was like ‘yeah, I can smell you’. That means we’re talking full on dead body time now if my wife is affirming that she can smell something. We actually left the party quite early, I’m afraid to say. I can’t have this being everyone’s abiding memory of this evening! I put my coat back on, high-fived various people, told them that I loved them and we went home. We stopped at a garage on the way home, bought a bunch of sausages and bread and made sausage sandwiches and sat on the floor and scrolled Twitter.”

GettyWHAT NEXT FOR MULLIN & WREXHAM?

Mullin has continued to star for Wrexham in the current campaign, having overcome a serious injury picked up in pre-season, and the Red Dragons are hoping to throw another promotion part in 2024 – one that Ker can fully invest himself in.