Wrexham have moved fast in the summer window, signing Crystal Palace full-back Danny Imray for around £5 million — their first notable piece of business since narrowly missing out on a promotion playoff spot last season. At 23 and with Championship experience already under his belt, Imray is exactly the profile Phil Parkinson needs to push this club further up the ladder.
Imray's path to north Wales is genuinely unusual. He started in the National League South with Chelmsford City, joined Palace's academy in February 2021, and worked through loans at Bromley (League Two) and Blackpool (League One) before Palace recalled him mid-season and shipped him to West Brom, where he made 17 Championship appearances as the Baggies scraped away from relegation. That's a lot of football at a lot of levels in a short space of time — and it shows adaptability that a club with Wrexham's ambitions will need from their squad depth.
Filling the Kaboré void
The signing makes practical sense too. Issa Kaboré, on loan from Manchester City last season, impressed enough to leave a real gap when he returned. Imray walks straight into that conversation. Whether he can hit those same heights consistently at a club with genuine promotion aspirations rather than just consolidation ones — that's the real question the next 12 months will answer.
"The Club want to be in the Premier League," Imray said after signing, "and after speaking to the gaffer it's just such an exciting project to be a part of." It's standard new-signing language, but when the project involves Ryan Reynolds, Netflix cameras, and three straight promotions, the pipeline at least has credibility behind it. Wrexham's chances of a fourth consecutive promotion just got a shade more realistic — and so did the case for backing them in the League One title market.
Mullin moves on, legacy intact
Meanwhile, Paul Mullin's five-year Wrexham chapter closed quietly. The 31-year-old departs as the club's seventh-highest scorer — 110 goals in 172 appearances — having been central to all three of those promotions. But the final chapter was rough: dropped entirely by February 2025, loan stints at Wigan (five goals in 26 games) and Bradford (zero goals in nine) suggested the drop-off was real, not temporary.
Rotherham United is a sensible landing spot. Mullin won League Two Player of the Year at Cambridge, led the division in scoring, and repeated the trick when Wrexham came back down to that level in 2023-24, bagging 24 goals in 38 league games. At League Two pace, he still has something to offer — and Rotherham will be hoping that version shows up, not the one that went missing in the second half of last season.
