Princess Diana Actually Owned a Philadelphia Eagles Varsity Jacket

The Philadelphia Eagles are officially headed to the 2023 Super Bowl following their NFC championship win over the weekend, and apparently, Princess Diana would have been pleased  — well, kind of.

Although the late princess did own an oversized Eagles varsity jacket that she wore on multiple occasions throughout the ‘90s, it actually had little to do with her love of the team. According to Harper's Bazaar, the story behind the jacket traces back to the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco, a Philadelphia native, in 1982. After striking up a conversation with fellow funeral attendee Jack Edelstein, a statistician and spotter for the Eagles radio network, Diana took a liking to the team because of its colors and logo.

Recounting their conversation to the Philadelphia Daily News, Edelstein said, “She thought football was like soccer. She asked, 'What are your colors?' I said, 'Green and silver.' She said, 'Those are my favorite colors.'”

The conversation was enough for Edelstein to promise to send back some merchandise once returning to the United States, but the owner of the Eagles at the time, Leonard Hyman Tose, thought a custom jacket would be better suited for the Princess of Wales — and he was right. Upon receiving the jacket, Edelstein said Diana sent “a very nice note” about “how she’d been wearing it around.”

Where did she wear it, exactly? One famous shot showed her outside of London’s Wetherby Prep School in 1991 sporting the jacket over a black shirt and high-waisted dark wash denim skirt. Another even saw her wearing it on a cover of People in 1994 paired with a black turtleneck sweater.

But according to Andrew Morton, author of Diana: Her True Story, just because Diana wore the jacket doesn’t mean she was a die-hard Eagles fan. “She wears these things because they create a look,” he told Daily News in 1991. “She knows very little about English sports, let alone American teams.”