Flower Power

Once a modest sign of remembrance for the war dead, the poppy has increasingly been used as a prop for performative patriotism, and a tool that helps to gauge others' loyalty to an ideal of national sacrifice

- Samira Shackle

IN AUTUMN 2003, about six months after Britain invaded Iraq, Paul Mace had a thought: what if we put poppies on football shirts? Mace, who was then executive director of Leicester City, had always felt strongly about the annual poppy appeal – his father had served in the second world war – and this, he hoped, would bring it to another level.

After securing permission from the Premier League, Mace had to find someone to design and manufacture an embroidered poppy patch for the shirts. Poppies in the UK are supplied by a charity, the Royal British Legion (RBL), to raise funds for ex-service personnel in need, but since the RBL didn’t produce patches, Mace arranged to auction off the shirts afterwards and donate the funds.

The first match where Leicester’s strip would feature poppies was a week before Remembrance Sunday, against Blackburn Rovers. It was going to be aired live on Sky Sports, and it struck Mace that if only one team was wearing poppies, the other team would look bad. “We didn’t want a situation where we had ourselves as a club on TV wearing poppies, showing up the other team,” he told me, his slightly incredulous tone indicating how outrageous this would have been. Blackburn hastily commissioned its own poppy patches.

The match was the first time remembrance poppies had been worn by all the players in a Premier League game. “I don’t think I ever heard a single complaint, and universal praise is very rare in football,” said Mace. He was proud to see veterans parading on the pitch at half-time, proud of the positive press coverage and proud to raise more than £5,000 for the RBL. “If I look back on 13 years at Leicester, this was probably the best decision I ever made,” he said.