Manchester United and Leeds United will meet twice in a week in the Premier League to renew one of football’s most enduring rivalries.
Rivalries are everywhere in football, of course. They crop up, and endure, for various reasons and for different lengths of time.
Some are sleeper rivalries, the result of competition for honours. Those ones settle down and only re-emerge when trophies are on the line. Some rivalries are down to geography, others come of football itself.
Occasionally, in the case of Celtic and Rangers in Scotland, they are, well, complicated.
The rivalry between Man Utd and Leeds is one of the most fiercely enduring in all of football though, with its roots going as far back as the mid-15th century to the pre-Tudor era.
So, just why are the two clubs, who sit 40 miles apart, such fierce and historic rivals?
Why are Man Utd and Leeds rivals?
The rivalry between Man Utd and Leeds long pre-dates football. You have to go back more than 500 years to discover its roots.
Don’t worry, though, you don’t have to be a history buff to get it. Just watching Game of Thrones will pretty much catch you up. It’s basically the Starks and Lannisters – two powerhouses in a fight for control and influence in a castle-strewn landscape.
The War of the Roses was a series of bitter conflicts in a 32-year civil war between the House of Lancaster (Lancashire's red rose) and the House of York (Yorkshire's white rose) that ultimately ended with the extinction of both houses and the birth of England's Tudor dynasty.
Once swords and spears were dropped, the rivalry between the cities of Manchester and Leeds continued through the English industrial revolution, as again both directly competed for greater regional prosperity. Often, the success of one meant a decline of the other.
Football rivalry between Man Utd and Leeds
At this point, some may be asking why, then, Leeds and Manchester City not rivals. If it was all about distant, deep-rooted history then they surely would be.
The answer is, of course, football, and can be traced back to two men: Matt Busby and Don Revie.
In the 1960s, both clubs were really taking off with iconic managers in their respective history and they were on a collision course. A 1965 FA Cup semi-final descended into a punch-up between Jack Charlton and Denis Law, with the Yorkshire post reporting: “Both sides behaved like a pack of dogs snapping and snarling at each other over a bone.”
Leeds won the Cup semi-final but Man Utd won the League that year – pinching it from Leeds on goal difference.
That was the start of the football rivalry, but not the end. They fought bitterly intermittently from there-on. In 1991/92, for example, the last season before the Premier League began, Leeds and Man Utd were battling it out for the title. Leeds won it, Man Utd took their title the following year.
Then there has been the individual player battles too, with Roy Keane and Alf-Inge Haaland springing immediately to mind.
Alan Smith didn’t help much either. Smith was asked at the height of Leeds’ modern era in 2002 if there was one team he would never play for: “Yes,” he said. “Man Utd.”
Smith was Leeds born and bred, and following their relegation in 2004 he had vowed to remain at the club to help rebuild it. Within weeks, he had signed for Man Utd, and the anger and sense of betrayal is still palpable today.
So, the reason Man City and Leeds are not rivals is essentially down to football alone, and from a Leeds point of view there is a definite ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ kind of situation going on there. The red colour of Man Utd’s kit it also a factor given the history.
Source : 90min