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I said yesterday that I would show you why Wrexham and a few other Welsh clubs play in the English l...
I said yesterday that I would show you why Wrexham and a few other Welsh clubs play in the English league. The reason is that rugby is much more popular than football here so the Welsh football league is of a much lower standard than that in England. If the few big clubs played in the Welsh league, they would be completely out of place. In UEFA's ranking of 54 European national football leagues, the English league comes 3rd and the Welsh 51st.

What you are looking at here is the home ground of the club which finished third in last year's Welsh Premier League, the top division of Welsh football, which I suppose makes them the Welsh equivalent of Arsenal. The ground has a capacity of 1600 spectators, roughly half that of the smallest ground on my list of 116.

The club in question is Airbus UK Broughton and the ground is actually on the airfield, which is why I can't get close to it. Like many of the clubs which I will be visiting, it started as a works team and then started to bring in players from outside. There are no major clubs in England which still bear the name of the original employer but Philips Sport Vereniging, originally the team of the Dutch electronics giant, it a well-known European example. The same rules on advertising which mean that Philips have to play internationally under the name PSV Eindhoven have meant that Airbus have played their few international matches as AUK Broughton.


UTC Time: 10:01, Monday 10 August 2015
Local Time: 11:01, Monday 10 August 2015
Estimate of longitude: 2° 58' 57.47" W = -2.982630°
Estimate of latitude: 53° 10' 13.66" N = 53.170460°
Possible error on position estimate: 100 metres