"We're up against teams with state-of-the-art training grounds," Phil Parkinson said — and he's not wrong. Wrexham have spent years cobbling together a training setup across multiple sites. That changes next month.
The Red Dragons are set to open a purpose-built Training Pavilion at Colliers Park when the squad returns from their preseason trip to America. Until now, players had to train at Colliers Park and then drive back to the Racecourse Ground for basic needs — changing rooms, gym, medical, meals. For a club about to play Championship football, that's an operational headache no one in their dressing room wanted going into the toughest season in the club's modern history.
A decade without a permanent home base
The backstory here matters. Wrexham originally built Colliers Park in 1997 for around $1 million — at the time, one of the best non-Premier League training setups in the country. Barcelona used it during European trips to England. Then came the financial collapse. By 2011, the club had sold both the training ground and the Racecourse Ground to Wrexham University. They lost full-time access to Colliers Park entirely in 2016.
Since the Hollywood takeover, the squad has trained at Colliers Park, the Racecourse Ground, and Carden Park near Chester — wherever they could make it work. That kind of instability doesn't just cost time. It sends a message to players weighing up their options.
Parkinson is direct about what the new facility means for recruitment: "We need that to attract players." In the Championship, where the wage gap between clubs is already stark, every edge in the package you offer a prospective signing counts. A polished training base with everything on-site won't close that gap entirely — but turning up to show a player a fragmented multi-site operation would have made it worse.
What this means for the season ahead
Wrexham's Championship odds reflect the reality of a newly promoted club stepping into serious company. The infrastructure piece won't move those numbers on its own. But it removes an operational drag that had no business existing at this level.
The club acknowledges Colliers Park is a three-to-five year solution while they search for a permanent site to build something truly their own. For now, the Training Pavilion is what they've got — and it's a significant step up from what came before.
"As the club's progressed on the pitch, the training facilities in particular... it's been difficult to keep pace," Parkinson admitted. At least that problem is about to be addressed.
