Wrexham’s rise from non-League football to being a realistic contender to play in next season’s Premier League is a great story, whatever your viewpoint on how they’ve done it.

A run of three successive promotions (so far) is extremely rare in British football, and Phil Parkinson’s side will look to create another special night for the north Wales club when they host Chelsea in the FA Cup on Friday, with a quarter-finals place at stake.

Impressive? Yes. Notable? Absolutely. But is Wrexham’s story a football fairytale?

On World Book Day, we thought we’d compare, contrast and rate the game’s truly magical stories.

Wrexham’s Hollywood script

Wrexham co-owners Ryan Reynolds, left, and Rob Mac, right, celebrate promotion to the Football League in 2023 with manager Phil Parkinson (Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)

Ridiculous rise, incredible achievements, two very likeable owners and a working-class town and club reborn by one of modern football’s most famous rags-to-riches tales.

But how much of a fairytale actually is it, with the big spending, the huge sponsorship deals and the documentaries? It’s all very fun — and retaining Parkinson as manager throughout adds an element of wholesomeness — but the very deliberate and calculated engineering of the journey takes the edge off its fairytale rating. 6/10

Data rise at Brentford

Nothing screams fairytale like data metrics and Jordan Henderson anchoring your midfield.

The dictionary definition of a fairytale speaks of magical and imaginary beings and lands. Nobody has ever called Brentford head coach Keith Andrews a magical or imaginary being.

However, in modern Premier League terms, the Brentford story is probably underappreciated, especially given the low budget and crowds. They are a shining example for every EFL club, but you didn’t see beanstalk enthusiast Jack spending £42million ($56m) on Dango Ouattara in his particular fable, did you? 4/10

Leicester’s 5,000-1 title

Jamie Vardy, right, and his Leicester team-mates celebrate winning the Premier League (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

We were all Leicester this time 10 years ago, weren’t we? One of the greatest stories English football has ever seen, starting with a genuine great escape the season before (they were bottom of the Premier League and seven points adrift of safety at the start of April 2015) and ending when title-winning manager Claudio Ranieri was ruthlessly chopped in February 2017.

In between, there was Jamie Vardy’s energy drink-inspired record-breaking goalscoring heroics, N’Golo Kante covering two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, lots of pizza, Nessun Dorma, that Vardy goal against Liverpool, Gary Lineker presenting a TV show in just his underpants, winning at Manchester City and watching the Battle of the Bridge that Monday night at Vardy’s house.

Leicester had no right to do what they did, and it will probably never be repeated. They’ll make pantomimes from this story one day. 10/10

Bodo/Glimt

As with Wrexham, there are a few chapters left in this one.

From the Norwegian second division in 2017 to slaying European giants Inter, Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in 2026, it’s been a heck of a journey from the cold of the Arctic Circle, where Glimt draw crowds of under 8,000 in a town with a population of 40,000.

The purity rating is high, with a weekly wage bill estimated to be £150,000 for the whole squad — an amount Erling Haaland doesn’t get out of bed for — but they’ll need to get a bit beyond the Champions League’s last 16 later this month for a higher fairytale rating. 7/10

Bournemouth up the leagues

It never feels like there’s much love for the Bournemouth story.

Like Wrexham, they have a handsome Hollywood actor on board — in their case, Michael B Jordan.

But there’s just something about ‘Bill Foley’s Black Knight Football Club consortium’ that doesn’t scream fairytale. And the way they powered through the leagues, backed by a mysterious Russian multi-millionaire with a financial fair play breach on the way up from the Championship, wasn’t very romantic. 2/10

Greece win the Euros

Greece stunned the football world when they won Euro 2004 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

Not a footballing miracle, given they were probably the 13th- or 14th-best nation at the 16-team tournament (above Latvia and Bulgaria, for sure), but certainly the most unlikely victory in the history of the European Championship.

Otto Rehhagel engineered four industrious victories against hosts Portugal (in both the group stage and the semis), France and the Czech Republic, with goals from corners winning them their semi-final and the final by 1-0 scorelines. That does take the edge off the fairytale aspect a smidge — sorry, Arsenal fans, that’s just the way it is. 8/10

Nottingham Forest’s European double

From an unfashionable, unsuccessful mid-table club in the second tier in May 1975 to English champions and European Cup winners — not once for the latter but twice, back to back — five years later… that is surely the most unlikely, never-to-be-repeated story in European football history?

Without spending much money, this was scouting and management at its very best, with Brian Clough and assistant Peter Taylor finding rough gems and forging them into an unbeatable (well, for 42 games in a row) team.

As Clough might have said: “Clough and Taylor as Beauty and the Beast? Well, we know who the beauty is, young man.” 10/10

Wimbledon win the FA Cup

Vinnie Jones and his team-mates celebrate their FA Cup final triumph in Wimbledon town centre in 1988 (Pascal Rondeau/Allsport/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A non-League club in 1977, Wimbledon had lifted the FA Cup and finished sixth in the top flight by 1988.

The self-styled rough and ready ‘Crazy Gang’ didn’t play like they were in a fairytale; we’re not sure the three bears would have set each other’s clothes on fire and Snow White definitely wouldn’t have grabbed Paul Gascoigne’s meat and two veg. But it was a great story nonetheless. 8/10

Manchester City dominate English football

On the face of it, going from third-tier League One (or Division Two as it was then known) in 1999 to winning the Premier League in 2012 and then dominating English football thereafter is some fairytale, especially with a first Champions League crown to boot in 2023.

In reality, spending more than £2billion to do it after being bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a company controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, is about as much of a fairytale as an episode of Black Mirror. And the big bad wolf of the Premier League may soon blow their Etihad house, down via those never-ending 115 charges. 1/10

Zambia’s AFCON triumph

Unfancied Zambia’s only Africa Cup of Nations win (in 2012) carries endless resonance, given the tragedy the team and the country suffered in 1993, when 18 players were killed in a plane crash in Libreville, Gabon.

Manager Herve Renard led them to an incredible victory over favourites Ivory Coast in the final, despite their opponents not conceding a goal during the entire tournament (Zambia won the trophy on penalties after a 0-0 draw). The fact that match took place in Libreville was unbelievably poignant. 10/10