Leicester City's Premier League match against Graeme Souness’ Blackburn Rovers on 2 November, 2003 was the first fixture to have embroidered red poppies on the players’ shirts.
The 20-year-old shirt featured here was worn by Les Ferdinand in the home fixture on Filbert Way, another treasure unearthed by Club Historian John Hutchinson from the Club’s historic collections.
This innovation has now become an established tradition nationwide. The Premier League was so impressed with the idea that it wrote to all its clubs informing them about the Leicester City scheme and, ever since then, clubs have followed the Foxes’ example and held Remembrance Fixtures, with the teams all wearing embroidered poppies.
After the match, the players’ special poppy shirts were held back so that they could be raffled off to raise funds for the Royal British Legion, a practice which has continued to this day.
The game itself was televised live and broadcast to troops across the world. There were nearly 31,000 fans in the stadium. The final score was a 2-0 win for Leicester, the goals coming from Marcus Bent and Steve Howey. The significance of this fixture however was far greater than the result, establishing as it did a tradition which has been replicated annually nationwide ever since.
