Turning back time … Cavalry’s Charlie Trafford recalling Welcome to Wrexham fame​on February 8, 2025 at 6:45 pm

Let’s jump back in soccer time, shall we? After all, a throwback seems fitting given the hoopla surrounding Cavalry FC’s historic win Thursday over Mexican side Pumas UNAM.

It was Charlie Trafford’s seldom-seen scoring touch that ignited the heroic comeback for Calgary’s professional footie side — just one more chapter in an adventurous career for the Calgary-born self-described “little kid at heart” …

With perhaps the best being his tenure with a small club that gained big fame with the help of television.

So we’ll kick back a few years to a story we ran on the veteran Trafford — now 32 — in October 2022 amid the Canadian Premier League playoffs.

Welcome to Wrexham.

If you’re not on the ball with this, here’s the score …

It was a soccer documentary on FX that dives behind the scenes of a club in Wales recently purchased by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

Around Cavalry FC, it’s been a bit of a talking point.

Not only because it’s a compelling TV show about the sport the Cavs play and dearly love but because one of their own was playing with Wrexham A.F.C. when the filming of the 18 episodes went down and the two A-list celebrities were afoot in the Welsh city of 60,000 people.

“It was pretty crazy and surreal timing for me,” said veteran midfielder Charlie Trafford, now in his first year with Cavalry. “I had this move to Calgary kind of earmarked for January. And so last summer, when it came to my last season in Europe, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was gonna do, because I wanted to stick around Europe from August until January.

“So this move to Wrexham came up on like a short-term deal just until the end of January. So it made a lot of sense to just go do something kind of different.”

Turns out, it was very different, with the likes of Reynolds — a Canadian actor of the Deadpool franchise — and McElhenney — an American funny man from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame — lighting up the club and the blue-collar footie hub.

Trafford signed up to play for Wrexham about a week before Reynolds and McElhenney came to town for the first time.

“They came overseas, and there’s hundreds of cameras at every training, and they came out to the training, so they were there for about a week and watched a game and hung around the players,” Trafford said. “They’re just huge sport fans and just easy-going, and they’re in something new, so they’re not walking around with big egos or anything like that.”

In fact, it was quite the opposite.

“I spoke with Rob on the day they came out, and I told him that it’s pretty surreal to have A-list celebrities here that are known around the whole world and be very real with them,” Trafford said. “And he turned to me and was so excited and said, ‘For us, it’s so cool — it’s like as a child dreaming of stuff like this, like me going out and getting to do batting practice with like the New York Yankees.’ And I’m like, ‘No it’s not, laughing.’ I was like, ‘I appreciate that, but it’s not quite that. When you turn this into a Premier League club, then maybe.