For Phil Parkinson and Wrexham, the Championship is going to bring about a lot of new challenges, with one of them being the international breaks.
The Championship roster for the 2025/26 season is looking extremely competitive. Wrexham, Birmingham City and Charlton Athletic have moved up from League One, whilst Southampton, Leicester City, and Ipswich Town have all come down from the Premier League.
And Wrexham and Birmingham City look set to take the second tier by storm. Or at least try to. It’s already been revealed that Wrexham have a £25million transfer budget this summer, whilst Blues chairman Tom Wagner previously suggested that Birmingham City could break their transfer record once again this summer.
What comes of both teams next season remains to be seen. For Phil Parkinson, many of his Wrexham players have never played in the Championship before. There’s new challenges set to face them and one of those will be dealing with the international breaks.
Phil Parkinson explains the difficulty that Wrexham face with international breaks
In League One and League Two, clubs can choose to postpone matches during international breaks if they have three or more players away on international duty. It led to weekends where there were just a couple of games going on in League One last season, but that’s another argument.
In the Championship there are no games scheduled during international breaks. It’ll give Parkinson’s players some much-needed resting point throughout the season, but it also poses the risk of losing momentum.
Speaking to Leader Live, Parkinson has given his thoughts on the threats that international breaks pose for his players. He said: “The international breaks are interesting and it is about getting the balance in that right, between keeping the players going and obviously having some time away from the training ground.
“The games come thick and fast during the season with a lot of midweek games and that is why you have got to utilise the international breaks, and think carefully how we plan them out, but we will definitely do that.”
- READ MORE: Wrexham now rivalling Premier League teams in race to sign ‘exceptional’ left-back this summer
How many international players do Wrexham currently have?
Expect Wrexham to add a couple of internationals to their ranks this summer, given the quality of player they now need to target in the transfer market, and given the quality of some of the players linked with a move to Wrexham this summer.
Those players don’t get as much rest as others do when there’s an international break. So for Parkinson, finding that balance as he says is going to be really tricky, and it could throw up some real problems for him across the course of the campaign.
Thankfully for Parkinson, he doesn’t have a whole lot of international players in his side. James McClean has 103 caps for Republic of Ireland but retired in 2023, whilst Jacob Mendy has three caps for Gambia.
But there’s speculation that Mendy could leave Wrexham this summer and so next season’s international breaks could give the Wrexham squad, pretty much across the board, a welcome rest.