Leeds vs Manchester United at Elland Road: Let battle commence - The Athletic 18/2/22

Phil Hay

The curious thing about Leeds United and Manchester United crossing paths in Yorkshire, with a Premier League backdrop and a crowd on top of them, is the number of people who will not have experienced the sensation first-hand before.

They talk about it on both sides of the Pennines, but the last time a capacity crowd at Elland Road took in a league game between these two clubs was October 2003. Joe Gelhardt was one year old and Zidane Iqbal, Manchester United’s wonderfully-named midfield talent, even younger than that. The newest generation in the teams’ respective fanbases have seen too little of the fixture that awaits them on Sunday.

There was a time when Leeds and Manchester United were top of the tree in England and, three decades ago, the clubs spawned two of the game’s most successful fanzines: The Square Ball in Leeds and United We Stand in Manchester, neither prone to pulling punches or holding its tongue. United We Stand made a name for itself in 1992 when it ran a ‘Champions At Last’ front-page headline… a short time before Leeds beat Manchester United to the title.

Ahead of Sunday’s game at Elland Road, The Athletic invited Dan Moylan of The Square Ball (TSB) and Andy Mitten from United We Stand (UWS) to sit down with Phil Hay and chat over the history of the contest, the roots of the rivalry, the present day — and the prospect of Manchester United’s visit to Leeds having the atmosphere it craves.

I was going to start by asking you both what you think of each other’s fanzine — but let’s not get personal! So Andy, what’s the best thing you can say about Leeds United?

Andy Mitten: Leeds are a big, proud club from a city which is much the same. That’s how it is. I’ve always liked going there and I’ve always loved watching Manchester United at Elland Road. I’m glad Leeds are back in the Premier League. I’d rather look forward to the prospect of Manchester United-Leeds than Manchester United-Norwich. I like the fanzine culture and there’s a strong subculture in Leeds too. I went to Elland Road in 1991 to watch the Happy Mondays, The Farm, Northside and bands like that. That was when someone climbed up the massive floodlights. Shaun Ryder looked at him and shouted, ‘Are you Man U, you?’ I think I was about the only person who got that. I hope Leeds lose most of their matches and I’m sure the feeling’s mutual. There are times when the rivalry’s really vicious and I’ve experienced that. But when I wake up on Sunday, I’ll be looking forward to it.

Dan, any praise you can lavish on Manchester United?

Dan Moylan: For all the bitterness and rivalry — and it does get nasty. I dare say there’ll be a nasty undercurrent in Leeds on Sunday — these are the games you get out of bed for. We didn’t spend 15 or 16 years in the wilderness to get back up and not want a game like this. I was at that Happy Mondays gig as well, albeit as a wide-eyed teenager. It’s only in later years I’ve looked back on it and realised that in the summer of 1991 you basically had a load of Manchester bands and Liverpool bands all descending on Leeds; all of the M62 towns and cities getting together. It could have gone off spectacularly badly, but it didn’t.

Have you both had this rivalry drummed into you from a young age? Is it the sort of thing you school your kids in?

Mitten: No. More so Liverpool for me and, less so, Manchester City. We started United We Stand in 1989, so very early on in the cycle of UWS Leeds became a big deal. It kicked off in more ways than one when Leeds came up in 1990. We had a lot of games between us in a short space of time and going there was exciting, nervy and sometimes frightening. We’d park our coach on the other side of the M621, past the tunnel (on Lowfields Road) and you’d hear ‘YRA, we’re Yorkshire’s Republican Army’. It sounded menacing, and it was supposed to sound menacing. I was streetwise but not a hooligan. Plenty of Manchester United fans went looking for trouble and found it. My very first time, I was 17 and I don’t know why I did this but as we got off the bus and walked through the tunnel, I started to shout, ‘Manchester!’ I didn’t even get the word out before someone floored me. It’s the only time I’ve ever been hit at a game and we were 20 minutes past kick-off before I worked out which way Man United were shooting. But I carried on going because I loved it. When Leeds went down, I missed it.

You didn’t take pleasure in their demise?

Mitten: As a fan, yeah, but as a journalist I saw it a bit differently. I’ve had bizarre Leeds experiences. I interviewed Pablo Hernandez at Valencia in 2011 and I kept in touch with him at Swansea… but then obviously stopped when he went to Leeds! I split a lot of my time between Manchester and Barcelona and in Spain. A friend of mine once introduced me to a mate of his. It was Kiko Casilla. Then Casilla ends up at Leeds. I mean, come on! There’s Diego Flores too, who I knew best of all. I’d go with my family to see Diego in Leeds, but I never made the relationship public. He told me once that Marcelo Bielsa liked to go to Manchester but they couldn’t work the city out. He asked me if I’d show them around one time. I said to him, ‘Trust me Diego, the last person you want to be seen with in Manchester is me!’

I knew a Newcastle fan who took his daughter to games and always said that as a rule, she had to behave. But when it came to derbies against Sunderland, anything went. You take your son to Leeds, Dan. Will Sunday be like that?

Moylan: He’s still forming his identity around that. Kids these days are almost caught up in personalities and superstars. When he was about six, he actually latched onto Cristiano Ronaldo when he was at Real Madrid and wanted a Real Madrid kit. He went through a phase of liking Spurs because of Harry Kane. As time’s gone on, he’s realised that you’ve got to attach yourself to a team rather than players. I missed out on the historical aspect of the Leeds-Man United rivalry because I grew up in the 1980s when we were in the second division, but that three-year period, 1990-92, really cemented it. On our podcast, we’ve been going back through those seasons 30 years on in real time, match by match. We’ve looked at the press coverage at the time, the police reports and how those reports speak about the poison in the fixture. I picked up on it then and I was still in my early teens.

How does the atmosphere change for this fixture then? In a competitive sense, other matches will be more important over a season, but for Leeds no fixture is bigger on paper than this one.

Moylan: There are two threads to this. The first is that it’ll be as toxic as you can imagine. I don’t know how far it will go, but I imagine some things will be singled out by the crowd. You get the stuff around the deaths in Istanbul and Munich chants on the other side. It’s added an element of poison which I don’t like. I wish it wouldn’t happen, but I understand why it does and that’s quite often the nature of football rivalry, unfortunately. Because we were all away during COVID and out of the top division for so long, everyone will be straining at the leash on Sunday. But the other part of this is that there’s almost a bigger issue at Leeds, which is staying up. The atmosphere could turn towards that, depending on how Sunday goes. Leeds might end up becoming more preoccupied with ourselves.

Mitten: I like the enmity that comes with rivalry. I wrote a book about rivalries around the world and I’ve been to some mental places. When people talk about the Premier League having the best atmosphere, it doesn’t. Argentina and Brazil are miles better and miles louder. But when you go to Leeds-Man United, it starts to touch those levels. I don’t like songs about Munich or Istanbul either, but you’ll get minorities who sing them. As for the rest of it, we’ve got lots of songs about Leeds. None of them are complimentary. One of them starts, ‘Leeds as a city is a mighty fine place but their football team is a fucking disgrace…’ That was from the ’60s and I’ve no idea what the context of it was originally. The trivial side I don’t mind, even if it can be very edgy. Manchester United have had good results at Elland Road, but there have been notable occasions for Leeds too. I still can’t believe we lost the league to them in ’92.

Moylan: We won the league in ‘92…

Mitten: You’re right there. You won it. You did win it. You were the best team. I’m just seeing it from a different viewpoint — how did we lose it? That was the time when we did the fanzine with ‘Champions At Last’ on the front cover, in April 1992…

I’m surprised you didn’t burn all of those because I know you’ve still got copies of it.

Mitten: It was my decision to do it and when we took it for the first day of sale, we sold loads because everyone thought we were going to win the league. Life was wonderful! Luckily it wasn’t the social media age and people didn’t have mobile phones so, to an extent, we got away with it. We’d have been slaughtered, quite rightly, if that happened now. I was a young lad who got carried away.

Moylan: It’s funny as well, though. It blew up spectacularly and that happens in football all the time. That’s the whole point of taunting the opposition. We were chanting ‘Tyrone Mings is fucking shit’ against Aston Villa at the same time as we were conceding loads of corners. He heads one in and he’ll be there in front of us giving it the big ‘un. That’s the risk because it hurts to have egg on your face.

Mitten: What you’re saying about lockdown is very true. People have been caged up. Elland Road is one of those grounds where it’s very real. But there are different strands for me too. I’ve always been fascinated by Bielsa. I wrote loads about him when he was at Athletic Club (Bilbao). I see people ridiculing him but they’re missing the point about him. I really like him. The same with Leeds as a city. I liked clubbing there because it wasn’t Manchester. It wasn’t getting dragged down by the gangs and there was a good student scene. It’s strange because the two places are so close together (less than 50 miles) but because you’ve got the Pennines in the middle, it all seems so distant and other-worldly.

Dan, The Square Ball have been getting into the Eric Cantona saga on your podcasts this week. When you look back and consider people such as Howard Wilkinson and Gordon Strachan agreeing that, for reasons of attitude and dressing room harmony, Cantona had to go, can you be philosophical about it?

Moylan: I suppose, but when you essentially give your best player to your biggest rivals for a song and that incentivises them to win the title, it’s quite hard to take, isn’t it? After such a close run race in 1991-92, to then do that…especially set against the backdrop of Leeds in the following season, where we didn’t win away from home once. To give away one of your few mercurial talents, it really hurt.

What if the boot had been on the other foot, Andy?

Mitten: I just thought it was hilarious. Cantona was a great player but because most of his success was at Manchester United, it’s hard for Leeds to stomach. A parallel for us would be Paul Ince. Ince was a brilliant player for Man United but he’s been cast as a villain because he played for Liverpool and had the audacity to speak his mind about Man United, when a lot of the time he was right to do so. Victors write history and (Sir Alex) Ferguson cast him as a Big-Time Charlie. The thing about the rivalry is that Man United-Liverpool is always there. Man United-Leeds goes away but then comes back strong. I researched the War of the Roses about 20 years ago and a historian I spoke to said it was a load of nonsense, a misnomer. It was more about the textile rivalry between wool in Leeds and cotton in Manchester, a civic thing. I’m quite interested in all that.

I’m not sure I can see arguments over cotton and wool breaking out in the stands on Sunday. Anyway, to the present day — who is this the bigger game for?

Moylan: I don’t know if this is as big a game as it might have been. I’d normally have said it was bigger for Leeds because we’re freshly back in the Premier League, but this is almost one we need to get out of the way. There’s the issue of relegation to see off and this series of games — Man United, Liverpool (away on Wednesday), Spurs (at Elland Road next weekend) — is one where anything we get is a bonus. I’m almost a little underwhelmed by my lack of anticipation and because of that, I’m looking forward to the edge of Sunday because it’s a fine line between menace and thrill. All of that’s rooted in adrenaline. I just worry that if Leeds fall behind early or get walloped, like we did at Old Trafford at the start of the season, it becomes an anti-climax.

Mitten: It’s still a big game, though. Everyone I know who’s going is buzzing. It’s a hard ticket to get. Two of Man United’s best performances by a distance in the last two years have been against Leeds at Old Trafford. We’ve not been that good. But that brings me back to why I like Bielsa. He’ll have a go. He’ll go for it even if it fails. The chaos at Leeds was amusing to us but it’s much more balanced there now. It’s not first vs second but seriously, everyone’s up for it.

Is this Man United side made for hostile atmospheres? Back in the day, you had players like Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs and so on — footballers who could pretty much perform anywhere.

Mitten: Guys who loved going to Leeds, by the way. They loved the viciousness of it. Andy Cole said you’d get off the coach and someone would be on your case straight away, having a go — ‘Get back on the bus, you prick’. You’re that closed in at Elland Road. It’s not a super-stadium, where everyone’s kept miles apart. Your point is that this squad don’t have the same strength of character as other Man United teams and that’s true, but they do have technical quality. My question is: what are they going to be like when they get it up them? They’re not going to know until they take a throw-in by the Gelderd End. A few will be coming away on Sunday saying, ‘Woah!’ And good. I like that.

Predictions then. Dan, you first.

Moylan: The Everton result has taken the wind out of my sails. Heart and head are saying different things. Maybe there’s something in it for us, but I do expect an away win. We’re up against the most expensive squad ever assembled, aren’t we?

Mitten: We draw 1-1 all the time but I think Man United will win. That’s partly because I’m an idiot who thinks we’ll win every game. We’re not a particularly good team at the moment but it’s important to make it happen in this one.