This Week in Wrexham: The Jacket With the Wrong Dragon

A WrexPat's look at Wrexham AFC

Two posts in one day is new for me, but this one didn't fit in the last post and it deserves its own space. It's not a transfer or a match result. It's a jacket, and honestly it's the most Wrexham story of the week.

A white dragon on a Welsh club's crest

When Wrexham revealed their new away kit on July 11th, Macron also unveiled the matching pre-match anthem jacket, a sharp navy and black design meant for the players to wear arriving at the ground. Fans noticed something almost immediately: the dragon crest stitched onto it was white, not red.

That's not a small detail here. Y Ddraig Goch, the red dragon, is Wales. The white dragon has the opposite meaning in Welsh mythology, traditionally read as the invading Saxon force the red dragon defeats. Put plainly, per Thick Accent's breakdown of the mix-up, Wrexham's own shop had put the mythological enemy of Wales on a Wrexham jacket. Supporters clocked it within hours of the reveal, according to Wrexham Reds' reporting on the backlash, which noted the jacket had been modeled by Sam Smith in the club's own launch post.

Gone from the shop within days

By July 13th, the jacket had quietly vanished from the online store. Nation.Cymru confirmed with a call to the physical shop that it had been pulled from sale there too, both in response to the criticism. No statement from the club as of this writing, and no confirmation whether it's a permanent scrap or just a pause to fix the design.

My take: I don't think anyone at Macron or the club meant anything by it, this reads like a design team reaching for contrast on a dark jacket and not clocking the symbolism. But it's exactly the kind of mistake that gets caught fast in a fanbase this online and this proud of the badge, and pulling it quickly was the right call. Better a quiet removal now than a jacket in the merch aisle all season with the wrong dragon on it.

Sources: Thick Accent, on the white dragon design, Wrexham Reds, on the fan backlash, and Nation.Cymru, on the jacket's removal from sale.

Header photo: floodlights at the Racecourse Ground, Wrexham, by Jaggery, via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).