How little-known Welsh side The New Saints became the most dominant team in Europe
Domestic leagues are not often won this early into the season.
But in Wales at the weekend, The New Saints became the first side in Europe to be crowned national champions after a 4-0 win against Cardiff Met.
It’s the second consecutive season that they have won the JD Cymru Premier earlier than any other European side has won their domestic league.
The New Saints are also just four wins away from breaking the record for most competitive victories in a row, 27 – a high they set seven years ago, beating Ajax’s 1972 achievement.
Rooted in Wales
Owner Mike Harris, who says he attends every game both home and away when back in Wales, watched their win from his home in South Africa.
“I wasn’t planning on lifting the trophy quite as early as we have done,” he told Morning Wire
“You have to win the league to qualify for the Champions League. So it’s one of those things that’s the motivation to win the league. You only have an opportunity once a year to try and achieve in the bigger competitions.”
Harris has been at the club for 25 years, seeing them through name changes and a club merger with Oswestry Town FC, a team who also played in Welsh football despite being based on the English side of the border in Shropshire.
But the entrepreneur, who also runs an American fibre network business which has attracted more than $1bn in investment, does not own the best-known football club in Wales.
The likes of Cardiff City, Swansea City and Ryan Reynolds-owned Wrexham play in the English football pyramid, and have done so for more than a century.
Make the move
“I’d love to see them move over,” Harris said. “The difficulty is with them stopping that while they’re at the higher level of the English game.
“Colwyn Bay made the jump to come back. A lot of people would have presumed that because they’d been playing in England, it was going to be easy for them. But they’re in the bottom two.
“This illusion that English football’s vastly better may not quite be the case.”
He also said that, despite clinching their 16th Welsh league title, there was no chance of The New Saints taking the leap the other way.
“We’ve got no ambitions to join the English pyramid at all. Our business, our club and our history lives in Wales,” he added.
Harris’ dream with The New Saints follows the typical Football Manager storyline of taking a modest club with limited resources into the continent’s elite club competition.
There are fewer opportunities for clubs in the top league of Welsh football to qualify for European competitions. As league winners, The New Saints will once again play in the first qualifying round of the Champions League.
The New Saints dream
Despite their series of titles, the businessman said there’s still “a lot of work to do” at the club in order to achieve the ultimate goal of qualifying for the group stage of a Uefa competition.
“It’s going to be tough. You could never say it was impossible,” he said.
“People say ‘you should be able to beat Lithuanian sides and Gilbratan sides’. But all those sides are actually using more money on players than we are.”
Costs have also soared as electricity bills have quadrupled in the last two or three years, Harris said. Meeting Uefa criteria for facilities also requires significant time and investment.
With the Welsh national side’s recent successes in qualifying for the World Cup, the country’s FA is set to spend £6m on the Cymru Premier.
While The New Saints are a professional football club, most clubs employ staff and players on a part-time basis. With hundreds of thousands of pounds distributed to each tem, Harris hopes all clubs can go full-time to improve the quality of the league.
“You’d expect the club to have at least 12 or 13 players who would be available to train Monday to Friday morning afternoons,” he said.
The Welshman, who insists that he’ll be at the club “for life”, said his club had done better than others due to their investment in recruitment and being able to offer professional contracts to youngsters coming from academies at Manchester United, Manchester City and Aston Villa.
If other clubs are able to follow The New Saints, the league could turn a new page.
He said: “When more teams get their act together, the better that Welsh football gets.”
