"I was going to finish playing. Not through my choice, more through others'." That's Matty James — 35-year-old Championship midfielder, promotion winner, and former Leicester title-era mainstay — talking about the summer of 2024, when the phone stopped ringing and no one would give him a contract.
After playing 43 games in his final season at Bristol City, James hit the free agent market and found it completely closed. Not because of form. Not because of fitness. Because he was 32 turning 33, and clubs had drawn a hard line: no one over 27 gets signed, no one over 28 stays in the squad. He heard it everywhere he turned.
"I was baffled, to be honest," he says. "Whether it be data, whether it be youth, whether it be adding value to a squad. I'd played 120-odd games in three years."
Leicester kept him fit. Wrexham gave him a purpose.
What followed was one of the stranger stories in recent English football. Leicester — where James had helped win promotion in 2014, survived relegation in 2015, and then watched from the physio room as the title was won in 2016 after a ruptured cruciate ended his season — invited him to train with the first team through the summer and into October 2024. Four or five days a week, he drove down from his home near Manchester. Alone. With no match on the weekend to aim at.
"Don't get me wrong, it was hard at the end of July, it was hard at the end of August," he admits. "On Saturdays, I'm watching my kids play football, which was brilliant, but then getting home and following the scores on TV. Someone would get an injury and I'd be, 'I wonder?' That's not healthy."
He turned down a tentative MLS approach. He kept driving to Leicester. And in late October 2024, Wrexham — then a League One club — offered a trial that became a short-term contract, then an extension, then an 18-month deal running to June 2027.
The players-only meeting that rescued Wrexham's season
James didn't just survive at the Racecourse. He led. When Wrexham lost 5-1 to Southampton and then 2-0 at Birmingham in the space of five days last April — failing to register a single shot on target in the second match — it was James who approached striker Josh Windass about holding a players-only meeting.
"There were certain things creeping in," he explains. "Too much chatter about where we were trying to go. There were four games left and I said to the lads, 'Let's not think about that — let's approach it as a group of lads who need to deliver in the next training session, and the next match.'"
Wrexham won their next two, against Stoke and Oxford, and pushed the play-off race to the final day. They finished seventh — one win short of a play-off place — after a 2-2 draw with Middlesbrough. Gut-wrenching, but not a collapse. There's a difference.
"Seventh is probably the worst place to finish in football," James says, "other than relegation."
Now Wrexham open the new Championship season at Cardiff on Monday — a Welsh derby, a proper occasion — before a brutal run of away trips to Millwall, Swansea, and West Ham in the weeks that follow. Home fixtures against Watford, Birmingham, Burnley, and Southampton complete a first eight matches that would test any promoted side.
James is signed until 2027. And given how badly Wrexham missed him during a nine-game injury absence last spring, Phil Parkinson will be hoping that contract holds. A midfield leader who nearly wasn't here at all has become one of the first names on the teamsheet.
"I was close to calling it a day," he says. "Which would have been a travesty, really, as I was nowhere near ready. And I'd have missed out on all this."
