A healthy rivalry alive in Yorkshire
GO to any football ground in Yorkshire, especially if it’s a Yorkshire derby, and there’s a decent chance there’s one chant that will rise out of the stands – ‘we all hate Leeds...’
From Doncaster to Huddersfield, from Hull to Rotherham, the one thing all football fans can agree on is that however bad the other lot might be, they’re still not as bad as Leeds.
A large part of that is because Leeds United are the biggest club in Yorkshire in terms of post-war success.
Their three league titles are matched by Town and Sheffield Wednesday, but the most recent of those combined seven league title wins came in 1930; while the only other Yorkshire club to have won a league title, Sheffield United, did so in 1898. By contrast, Leeds’ first title win came in 1969 and the last came in 1992.
They also reached four FA Cup finals in eight years between 1965 and 1973 (though they only won one of them), and we believe they may have played in the 1975 European Cup final and lost to Bayern Munich in controversial circumstances, though they don’t like to go on about it 45 years on...
As recently as 2001 they were playing in the Champions League semi-final.
So they do perhaps have some grounds on which to lord it over the rest of Yorkshire. They are indisputably historically successful, and the crowds they drew even during their years in League One were impressively large, setting a third-tier record that was only recently eclipsed by Sunderland.
What rankles for their local rivals, though, is that they are perceived as unduly smug about their standard for a club that has not graced the top flight of English football for 16 years.
The reality is that Leeds’ last 16 years have been much like most seasons for Barnsley, Doncaster Rovers, Town, Hull City, Rotherham, Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday: that is, spent in the Championship and League One.
In fact they’ve failed to reach the heights several of those sides have reached: during that time, Town have had two seasons in the top flight, Hull City five seasons over three spells, and Sheffield United are on track to not only secure their third season in the Premier League, but to qualify for Europe.
That Leeds fans still nonetheless consider Manchester United to be their greatest rivals says a lot about how they view their own standing in the game. This perceived sense of superiority is understandable, as are their attempts to hold on to it - it’s not their fault, after all, that they fell into the hands of a series of truly awful owners.
But that will not stop an unabashedly gleeful smile from passing over the face of the rest of Yorkshire if it were to turn out that they were unable to be promoted back up to the top flight this year.