Why Are Manchester United and Leeds United Massive Rivals?
Manchester United and Leeds United go head to head in a Premier League match for the first time in 16 years on Sunday afternoon.
In the more than 15 years that Leeds were out of the top flight, these two historic giants of English football played each only twice in cup competitions. The last of those was an early round of the EFL Cup way back in 2011.
A whole generation of football fans have missed out on one of the all-time great rivalries.
The last time Manchester United and Leeds met in the Premier League in February 2004, Ryan Giggs was only 30, while emerging talent James Milner had turned 18 the month before.
Up there with Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal and, more recently Chelsea, Leeds are one of Manchester United’s core rivals. Leeds have their own more established beef with Chelsea going back to the 1960s, but the Manchester United rivalry is right up there for them as well.
It is not a geographic rivalry in the sense of being local – a two-hour drive separates Manchester and Leeds. Nor is it solely born out of a competitive rivalry on the pitch between clubs that were always fighting for the same honours – if anything, Leeds replaced Manchester United as England’s dominant club in the late 1960s with only a few years of short overlap.
The football rivalry developed from an already historic rivalry between Lancashire, where Manchester resided until new county boundaries were created in 1974, and Yorkshire. That was initially born out of the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century as the House of Lancaster and House of York battled in what was essentially a stop-start 30-year civil war for the English throne.
In a similar way to that of Manchester and Liverpool, the rivalry was later furthered centuries later by the dawn of the industrial revolution and Manchester and Leeds’ respective statuses as rapidly developing and expanding cities powered by industry.
A first football game between Manchester United and a club from Leeds took place in 1906, but with Leeds United not formed until relatively late in 1919, the first proper meeting wasn’t until 1923.
The rivalry as we know it really began in the 1960s, when Don Revie guided Leeds back into the top flight and immediately began contesting for the First Division title.
Leeds finished second to Manchester United in 1964/65, while the clubs also met in an aggressive FA Cup semi-final that season. As Matt Busby’s team peaked and eventually faded after winning the European Cup in 1968, Revie’s side assumed their mantle, performing with remarkable consistency at a time when English football was much more fluid than today.
Despite Manchester United’s downfall and relegation in 1974, their return to the top flight soon after meant the rivalry still burned brightly and another FA Cup semi-final in 1977 saw violent clashes between fans both inside and outside the stadium.
Leeds spent much of the 1980s out of the top flight, meaning eight years passed by without the clubs meeting. But the 1990s and the dawn of the Premier League era brought with it fresh competitiveness and animosity, with Leeds having pipped Manchester United to the title in the final season of the old First Division in 1991/92.
Leeds were largely inconsistent in the 1990s, but they returned as a threat more towards the end of the decade when a young side guided by David O’Leary finished fifth or higher five years in a row between 1997 and 2002 – at one stage reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League.
It was Leeds’ relegation from the Premier League in 2004, the sorry result of unsustainable finances, that has led to the rivalry’s lull in recent times. Both sets of fans would still always name the other as a major foe, but the lack of games rather diluted it in the minds of everyone.
The dynamic will be different, but to have one of the biggest games in English football back on the calendar is welcome and long overdue.
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