Paris 75: a brutal but poignant Leeds United time capsule of true fandom — The Times 2/11/25

The 1975 European Cup final resulted in a riot and a ban and a chant for Leeds United. Harvey Marcus’s revealing film looks at how the game has changed in 50 years

Rick Broadbent

Half a century ago, the European Cup final had it all. Notoriety, the whiff of corruption, a deep seam of victimhood and 200 tracksuited judo experts to bolster security. It ended with a riot, a ban and a chant. Now a new film on the “final football tried to forget” illuminates the beautiful-damned duality of 1970s football and shows that European trips were an exotic adventure that can never be recaptured.

Beleaguered Leeds United fans still sing: “We are the champions, the champions of Europe”. Some of them don’t know why, but it is because of the disallowed goal and ignored penalty against Bayern Munich in 1975. It sounds trivial years on, but it went beyond one-eyed cris de coeur and, as Harvey Marcus’s powerfully poignant Paris 75 recalls, was the culmination of years of angst.

It is a deliberately partisan film, but if you want to see how football has changed, it is a valuable time capsule. And really, although Paul Reaney and Allan Clarke, now 81 and 79 respectively, are there as old boys to run through familiar Don Revie themes of defiance and brotherhood, this is a film of fans.

The stars are Heidi Haigh and Carole Parkhouse, two women who explain just how rare it was to be a female at football in 1975. The FA had only just lifted its ban on women players, and Haigh recalls how she and her friends were called “slags, scrubbers and whores” on the terraces. “If you were on the Kop you could guarantee someone would grab you,” she says. “You could cope with the bum-nipping — sometimes it was more as a laugh the lads would do it — but when wandering hands started, I didn’t like that. You don’t want someone feeling you up and down your body.”

One day at Wolves, as routine running battles ensued, she says bluntly: “We thought we were going to get attacked and raped.” Parkhouse talks of taking away ends, which was a thing in days of pre-segregation, and of there being maybe a few hundred girls in a 17,500-strong tide of masculinity on the Kop. Another man, now a pensioner, remembers being stabbed in the leg at Newcastle and being taken to hospital. “I got back in for the second half.” Many newbies may ask why on earth they went, but that question fails to grasp just how tightly the ties of fandom wrapped those scarves and tourniquets.

In 1975, Leeds was a grim northern city with a brilliant football team. The European Cup final was the last chance. Revie had gone and the team was ageing. They won plenty — two league titles, the FA Cup, the League Cup and two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups, but were runners-up in seven major finals and five league campaigns. They would likely have done the double in 1972 had the FA not forced them to play the league decider the Monday after winning the FA Cup on the Saturday, and more of the disappointment was infused with similarly seething injustice. A low point was the 1973 European Cup-Winners’ Cup final refereed by Christos Michas, who blithely waved away three penalty claims and was later banned by Uefa. The neutral Greek crowd gave Leeds a lap of honour and pelted the victorious AC Milan players with missiles.

Peter Lorimer, the late Leeds hotshot, once told me: “These days it couldn’t happen. There are proper channels for investigation, but at the time Uefa was just a bunch of old fogeys who used to sit around getting pissed.” An interview with Clarke produced more suspicion. “I remember playing for England against Italy in Turin and lost 2-0 and both goals had been a good ten yards offside,” he said. “After the game Alf Ramsey found out the referee and both linesmen had been given brand new Fiat cars. I’ll say no more.”

The European Cup was a world away from the Champions League. As Parkhouse says, there were no guidebooks, no websites, no organised trips and no experience to draw on, let alone xG ratings of opposing teams. Europe might as well have been South America, so Parkhouse went to Switzerland and wondered if she needed to take her ice skates.

The gold of the film is the grainy footage shot on Super 8 by the fans. It is why Marcus, whose previous film was about another oft-ignored minority — elderly residents in a Thames-side alms house — was prepared to max out his credit card. “One of the fans in the film, Roy, posted a ten-second clip of the team training before the Cup Winners’ Cup Final in ’73 and I dropped him a message saying, ‘Do you know how rare that is?’ Those four or five fans who went to Zurich and Budapest became the story. Now we’re in an age were everyone has a camera and a phone and everyone’s a film-maker, but then it was so unusual.”

The final, itself, has become the defining moment in a club’s history. “More than the trophies that they did manage to win, that match shaped what Leeds United is today,” Marcus says.

Part of that is evergreen denial. Reaney is deliciously prickly when Marcus asks him about certain incidents, not least a shocking fourth-minute tackle from Terry Yorath that all but ended Björn Andersson’s career; he spent the next three weeks in a bed caked in plaster. Still defiant, still defending, Reaney suggests Yorath got part of the ball, but even Yorath would admit in his autobiography that he was “deeply ashamed” and that it would have been “immoral” for him to get a winner’s medal after that.

Leeds were dominant in the Parc des Princes, though. Johnny Giles was magnificent, Franz Beckenbauer a flustered giant. A penalty for handball by the defender was waved away. Sepp Maier made some sharp saves and throttled dynamic provocateur Billy Bremner. Clarke was clearly scythed down by Beckenbauer. Again no penalty. After 62 minutes, Maier parried a Bremner shot from point blank range. Relentless pressure finally told when Lorimer’s typically sweet volley found the top corner. The French referee gave the goal. The linesman ran back to the halfway line. Nobody complained until Beckenbauer persuaded Michel Kitabdjian to consult his linesman. Disallowed. And that was the start.

The men in blue tracksuits roughed up a fan who broke from the stands. Fans ripped out seats and threw them towards the pitch. People often say perpetrators of hooligan acts are not real fans, but they mean “law-abiding” because these were the truest fanatics, bringing ignominy on their club but simmering with the belief they were being cheated in plain sight.

Perhaps Leeds’ players were distracted or suffering from déjà vu, but Bayern then scored two goals. And that was that. Leeds were banned from Europe for four years. There had been rioting at the previous year’s Uefa Cup final between Spurs and Feyenoord and worse followed as hooligan firms began to draw in both the disaffected and unhinged. England became the scourge of Europe with the flag of St George an emblem of toxic patriotism. As for Leeds, they made one more cup final, the Coca-Cola sideshow in 1996 — and got thrashed 3-0 by Aston Villa.

The 50th anniversary of a day of shame did not draw a social media platitude from the club, but Paris 75 shows how the 1970s were also a time when champions supped tea in the greasy spoon by the ground, when you could be the best in Europe by winning only four ties, and when there was a closeness between four fans and 11 players that has gone from the game for ever.