To the casual observer, Wrexham‘s new third kit for the 2025-26 season has a distinct inflection of FIFA World Cup holders Argentina. With its sky-blue and white stripes, it wouldn’t look out of place draped over the shoulders of Lionel Messi — and that is for a very good reason.
The Wrexham story has become a global phenomenon as the Welsh club have thundered back up through the English football league system since being taken over by Hollywood pair Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2021, to the point where they are just one step below the Premier League.
After buddying up and buying into non-league soccer despite admittedly knowing next to nothing about the game, the actors-turned-investors first came on board with the club wallowing in the fifth-tier National League. Three promotions in three seasons followed, and their meteoric and somewhat unlikely transformation that has been documented all the way by the popular FX/Disney+ documentary series, “Welcome to Wrexham.”
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Wrexham will embark on their first season in the English second tier for 43 years with momentum firmly behind the team and the north Wales town they call home. They have already revealed their home and away kits for the occasion, produced by Italian manufacturer Macron.
The home jersey is a glorious red retro design with a centralized crest directly inspired by the shirt worn by the team during the 1981-82 season, the last time they played in the second-tier equivalent to the modern-day Championship. The away kit is inspired by the daffodil, Wales’ national flower, and is dappled in sunshine yellow.
“We are a unique club and we have a unique story. And for me, the kits are the best way to tell the story of a football club,” Wrexham CEO Michael Williamson told ESPN.
“We were able to develop three bespoke kits from scratch. It was around September last year when we started having the conversation internally about having our kits [for the 2025-26 season] be something special. I said there’s a very good chance we’ll be playing in the Championship, but more importantly I want it to be something that represents our club.”
And so, to complete the set of playing uniforms for next season, Wrexham’s new third kit is certainly special. The jersey bears the Albiceleste stripes made iconic in the football world by Messi and Diego Maradona before him, but reconfigured as horizontal hoops similar to those worn by Argentina‘s national rugby team, known as the Pumas.
The jersey has a far more personal and heartwarming origin story than your average kit concept. It marks the 160th anniversary of the first Welsh settlers arriving in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina.
A small band of Welsh natives boarded a boat and left their native land in 1865 (the year after Wrexham AFC was originally founded) in order to escape the English oppression that was prevalent in the country at the time. Those 153 settlers formed Y Wladfa (“The Colony”) in the Chubut Valley and made it their mission to preserve the Welsh language, traditions and culture while developing the valley through industry and agriculture.
Despite periods of hardship in the unforgiving terrain, there are now over 70,000 Welsh-Patagonians living in the region. Many still fluently converse in their native tongue in what is the largest (and possibly only) Welsh-speaking community outside Wales.
When asked how the idea of using the third kit to celebrate the people of Y Wladfa came about, Williamson said: “There’s this incredible story that we covered in the series that pays tribute to a group of Welsh settlers outside of Wales. So as a community, we decided to pay tribute to the Patagonia Reds and the Patagonian settlers.
“We started thinking ‘Well, okay, that’s interesting. How do we do that?’ And so clearly a little bit of the colors of the Patagonia Reds and the Argentinian flag with the Welsh dragon played into it, how we capture that into the kit representing that connection and that bridge [between us].”
The design features a pattern of dragons within the blue stripes, a red dragon on the back and the “Don’t forget where you came from” — a line from the song which features in the titles of “Welcome to Wrexham” — inside the shirt.
“There were a couple of different options [with all of the 2025-26 kits],” Williamson said of the design process. “We sat there with Rob and Ryan on their conference calls, who were up at 2 a.m. their time. We were literally going through: [put] those pipings here, let’s change this here, let’s invert that, let’s have this type of color with that type of pattern. In about a 24-hour span of hardcore, full-on design workshops, we came out with three concepts that we that we really liked.
“From that, we then sent that to Rob and Ryan for their input and their feedback — and I can tell you that from past experiences, they tend to have some very proactive feedback. So that’s always a little bit of a challenge. But the reality is that they absolutely loved the third kit design.”
The promo produced to launch the kit packs a big emotional punch. Two Welsh choirs — one standing on a cliff in Wales, the other on a rock face in Argentina — sing “Yma o Hyd” (“We’re still here”) to each other across 7,500 miles of wild Atlantic Ocean, before they all throw off their robes to reveal they are wearing the same shirt.
Although they live in the country of Boca Juniors and River Plate, there are some ardent Wrexham fans among the Patagonians. Those supporters were featured in an episode of “Welcome to Wrexham” and in the short film “ReUnited,” made in conjunction with Wrexham’s front-of-jersey sponsors United Airlines, which detailed the club’s efforts to remain connected with their fans on the other side of the world. Despite not currently flying any routes into Wales, the carrier helped five Patagonian fans with Welsh ancestry make the pilgrimage from Argentina to Y Cae Ras — Wrexham’s home ground — to set foot on the hallowed turf for the very first time on St. David’s Day.
“To be able to literally reunite a community that had not set foot in Wales before, but had Welsh culture and heritage and spoke Welsh and really had a connection and a passion for Wales — you can’t ask for a better partnership than that,” Williamson said.
The shirt now comes imbued with the very same spirit of resilience and perseverance embodied by those Welsh settlers who arrived in the vast expanse of Patagonia 160 years ago and have worked so tirelessly to keep the spirit of Wales alive there ever since.
ESPN senior editor Tony Mabert contributed to this report
