James McClean's Refusal To Wear The Poppy Has Made Him The Most Hated Man In English Socce

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Between the Poppy Factory in London and Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory in Edinburgh, the Royal Legion produces approximately 41 million poppies every year. To swim against that suffocating tide was only ever going to draw attention to McClean, and it has done so every November without fail since 2012, when he refused to wear one for his first English club, Sunderland, then in the Premier League. Sunderland said his reasons were “personal,” but McClean would later claim that he had been “hung out to dry” and told not to explain his reasons. It was only after he had left Sunderland, amid death threats and attacks from his own fans, for Championship side Wigan Athletic, that McClean clarified his rationale for not wearing the poppy.

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McClean is from the Creggan estate in Derry, Northern Ireland’s second biggest and predominantly Catholic city. In an open letter addressed to the Wigan chairman Dave Whelan, McClean explained that he could not wear a poppy because it was “used to remember victims of other conflicts since 1945.” As a son of a city eternally scarred by the British Army’s 1972 massacre of fourteen civil rights marchers—including six from Creggan—in what became known as Bloody Sunday, he said that he could not show “disrespect for the innocent people who lost their lives in the Troubles—and Bloody Sunday especially.”

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McClean has always doubled down: he has worn the Easter lily, which pays tribute to Irish republican dead such as Sands and Devine, and has on his leg a tattoo honoring Free Derry Corner, the historical landmark in Derry’s Bogside area that marks where republican paramilitaries operated a no-go zone for British forces from 1969 to ’72.

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