The match at Blackburn offers Wrexham players a chance to make history, and more excitingly, follow in the footsteps of a favourite of the 2010s, Danny Wright!
Our game is the earliest kick-off in European professional football, so the player that hits the net first will be the first to score in the continent.
If we dig beyond the professional game, we find competition: a Cymru Premier game kicks off at the same time as ours, so to be the first scorer of 2026 in all European competition, we need to strike before they do.
As the match pits Colwyn Bay against Flint Town United, at least the odds are stacked in favour of North Wales providing the player who achieves this peculiar landmark.
The stakes could be even higher, as there are only two games being played earlier anywhere in the world! In the Australian A-League, Auckland face Newcastle Jets at four in the morning UK time, and four hours later Western Sydney Wanderers host Macarthur.
If those games end goalless, we could see George Dobson score the world’s first goal of 2026!
That would emulate the feat Wright achieved in 2013. He scored after 24 minutes against Telford United, and as it was the earliest kick-off worldwide that day, with most countries on their winter break, Wright’s strike was the first goal scored globally in that calendar year.
New Years Day is a traditional day for football, up to a point. It’s a date which is played on fairly often, but not regularly, and it’s unusual to be preparing for a game on that date for a third year in a row.
Last season we travelled to Barnsley to kick off 2025. We started badly, with ex-Red Dragon Davis Keillor-Dunn opening the scoring and were two goals down before half an hour had been played. We rallied after the break but missed a number of chances before Max Cleworth gave us late hope with an 80th minute goal. We couldn’t build on that in a frantic finish, though, and suffered a rare January 1st defeat.
It was rare because we’d started on the front foot in each of the two previous times we’d played on that date.
In 2020, we commenced the year with a 2-0 victory away at Chorley, secured by late goals from Omari Patrick and Devonte Redmond. Our next New Year’s Day match inaugurated 2024 with a remarkable result against Barrow, a team boasting the league’s best defensive record at the time.
Despite conceding an early goal to Kian Spence, we responded during an extended first half—attributable to two head injuries—by scoring three goals in added time.
Steven Fletcher contributed, Paul Mullin added another, and Fletcher completed a brilliant hat trick in the second half.
Fletcher’s achievement remains the only hat trick by a Wrexham player on New Year’s Day since these fixtures began, and he is also the club’s leading scorer for matches held on this date.
This rarity illustrates the irregularity of New Year’s Day fixtures, as few players have amassed multiple appearances or significant goal tallies. For example, prolific scorer Tommy Bamford never played for Wrexham on January 1st, as his tenure began after the team’s prior fixture on that date, and he transferred to Manchester United before the subsequent opportunity.
Adrian Cieslewicz is the only Wrexham players to have scored on New Year’s Day in two separate years, while Kevin Russell, Harold Lapham, and Eddie Beynon have each scored two goals in a game on this date.
Cleworth is the only current player to have scored for us on the first day of the year.
We have not previously faced Blackburn on New Year’s Day, and it’s the furthest north we travelled on that date since 1987, when we lost 1-0 to Preston North End.
Indeed, we have a poor away record when playing on the first day of the year. The defeat at Barnsley a year ago was our seventeenth on the road, with just six won and four drawn.
At home it’s a very different story, as we’ve won fifteen, drawn four and lost just four.
Our most recent New Years Day away win in the Football League came back in 1966 when we won 2-1 at Lincoln City, and our biggest EFL away win was in 1947 when we enjoyed a 3-1 victory at Hartlepool United.
Our worst start to a New Year came back in 1926 when the now-defunct Wigan Borough doled out a 6-0 thrashing in the Third Division North.
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