OVER the next month thousands of Welsh football fans will look on enviously as the World Cup takes place without the Dragons.

But for one Wrexham-based business, the four-yearly festival of football will provide a perfect boost to a firm that is already hitting the back of the net.

Net World Sports, which is the UK’s biggest-selling football goal manufacturer, supplies more than 100,000 of its FORZA goals a year worldwide, as well as thousands of items of equipment, including balls, kit and even dugouts and team shelters across a variety of sports, from tennis to baseball.

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The Net World Sports warehouse team

A big sales push throughout the tournament is the latest in a string of success for Net World Sports, which is the only UK business to currently appear in all three of the most recent Sunday Times Fast Track 100 league tables ranking sales, profitability, and exports.

What makes the company’s story all the remarkable is the man behind it.

At 30-years-old, Alex Loven is already in charge of a global success, just nine years after Net World Sports became a limited company, when Alex and his dad operated a production line and his mum did the accounts.

“The first evidence of enterprise happened when I was 13,” he laughs. “My mum was a teacher and my dad sold antique beds and we didn’t have a lot of money but they broke the bank and sent me to private school, where I was the poorest person.

“I remember when they would say ‘it’s a bit tight this month’ and that gets you thinking.

“The only way to alleviate that was to make some money which might not make you happy but my god it makes things possible.”

Alex turned to cricket to solve his issues, buying a bat on ebay. It was a light bulb moment.

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“It cost £60 but I found they were just £6 from the firm in India that made them,” he explains. “I bought 10 and started selling them to friends at school.

“It was against the rules but I’m glad I broke them because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

Alex’s next defining moment came when he started working at a builder’s merchants in Oswestry aged 17 and quickly realised that perhaps college wasn’t for him.

“I was so shy when I started,” he remembers. “But when I left I was doing everything and I owe them so much.

“They gave me a chance and put up with me and I met all sorts of people. It taught me so much - I worked a 10-hour day and once worked 48 days on the trot.

“I learnt how to sell verbally and over the phone and it toughened me up. I would sweep the yard in the rain and it toughened me up.”

Alex took the decision to save as much of his wages as possible, enabling him to buy a container full of sporting goods stock. It was a massive risk but one which paid off.

“I didn’t get any samples and just went for it,” he says. “I felt I was young and had nothing to lose. It was very hard but I wanted to practice my cricket in the garden and wanted nets, so that’s how we started with nets.”

Having found the ultimate home cricket set up, Alex began selling to other cricket enthusiasts and Net World Sports was born.

“My dad had been made redundant and he was helping me with the packing,” laughs Alex.

“It was horrendously hard but my parents backed me with both belief and finances.

“If the phone rang there was nowhere to hide as all the customers went through me.

“There’s pictures of me from that time and my hair was like a hedge and I had severe acne but without great sacrifice there’s no great reward.”

Landmarks and milestones began to be ticked off with 2010 marking the company’s first £1m turnover and 2011 seeing them start to employ their first members of staff. They now employ just short of 100 staff at their offices and warehouses on the Wrexham Industrial Estate.

“There was a lots of guts and determination,” says Alex. “We employ so many really brilliant people and I like the fact that people can come here and within six months they can have a really integral role. It’s been life-changing for some.

“We give young people a chance and we don’t outsource anything. All our IT and web development is done in-house, along with marketing, distribution and obviously the warehouse.

“It gives us the power to do what we want and gives a huge scope of jobs available for the local market. We’re fit for the modern era and we’re looking forwards not backwards.”

As for the forthcoming World Cup, Alex agrees it is a massive opportunity for his business, which he says he hopes can stay in Wrexham.

“Anything that gets people outside and off their backsides is positive,” he says. “One of the first products we developed was called a rebounder, where you throw a ball at a frame and it bounces back at you.

“To catch the ball 10 times in a row you have to really concentrate and it’s fun, so in a country where the NHS can’t cope, anything that makes people healthier is a good thing.

“We desperately want to stay in Wrexham and if that happens we could be one of the biggest employers on the industrial estate.

“We are serving the world from this one location and staying close to our roots.”