The Great Euro Robbery: Fifty years on from the 1975 European Cup final, Leeds supporters are still convinced they were robbed by Bayern Munich, writes MATT BARLOW
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- Leeds United lost the European Cup final to Bayern Munich on 28 May 1975
- The game is still seen as controversial to this day because of two decisions
- LISTEN NOW: It's All Kicking Off! Is Ruben Amorim too honest?
One game survives like no other in Leeds United legend. One game that seldom fails to stir the emotions inside Elland Road. And that game is half a century old tomorrow.
‘I don’t think you forget it,’ says Joe Jordan, who is among those who featured in it. ‘To reach a European Cup final doesn’t happen often and many years have passed by and a lot of the players are, sadly, not with us any more, but I don’t think you can ever forget it.
‘You look back and try to analyse, but the result is there. We lost the game and that was a huge disappointment for me, for everyone in the dressing room and for all the Leeds fans.
‘It was a game we should have won, basically, and we didn’t. There were certain circumstances, but the facts are we didn’t win the game and that’s it, that’s all you can say, that’s football.’
This the European Cup final of 1975, Leeds vs Bayern Munich in Paris, the last hurrah for the great team built by Don Revie at the end of their tumultuous first season without him.
Bayern won 2-0, the second of their mid-1970s hat-trick of European titles, but that is only half the story.
‘The legacy of that game, the failure of that team to win the European Cup they deserved, the feelings of injustice and the subsequent UEFA punishments are among the reasons Leeds is still such a big club,’ says Rocco Dean, author of The Sons of Revie.
‘I was brought up with those stories and the feeling of a team robbed and that feeling has generated the passion you still get inside Elland Road. That’s the legacy.
‘Fans still sing “Champions of Europe” every week and it’s not something that will go away. It’s not just about the European Cup final because it does run a lot deeper. It’s the whole story of that era and it’s amazing how it led to that crescendo.
‘It was one last chance for Leeds to cement themselves into history as champions of Europe and it was taken from them, we think unfairly.’
Michel Kitabdjian, the French referee who died five years ago at the age of 89, was at the heart of the controversy after failing to give a penalty for a foul by Franz Beckenbauer on Allan Clarke and ruling out a Peter Lorimer goal.
Confusion descended after the Lorimer goal, a volley from outside the penalty area, as the officials seemed to signal a goal and then change their minds after Beckenbauer spoke to the assistant referee. Only then did they rule Billy Bremner offside.
‘It has lived on because it was so blatant,’ says Frank Gray, who played at left back. ‘Everyone who sees the footage thinks, “Why wasn’t that a penalty and why wasn’t that goal given?”
‘If VAR had been around then, they would have gone in our favour, but on the night the referee made a couple of bad decisions. It was not his best game, put it that way.’
A contest dominated by Leeds until that point took a twist. Franz Roth scored on the break and Gerd Muller snatched the second as Leeds piled forward.
‘I felt bad for some of the older players,’ admits Gray. ‘I was only 20 at the time, I knew for me there might be other chances and I was lucky enough to play in another final and win it with Nottingham Forest against Hamburg. But for the likes of Billy Bremner, Johnny Giles, Norman Hunter and my brother Eddie, we all knew realistically this would be their last chance to win the big one.
‘They had done so much for the club and that would have been the pinnacle, something they probably deserved. It would have been an incredible moment and I genuinely did feel sorry for them.’
Dean’s book centres on the 10 top-flight seasons under Revie and pitches them in the ranks of football’s great but under- appreciated sides.
‘They were certainly underrated,’ says Dean. ‘Nobody talks about Leeds as one of the great English teams and that would have been different had they won that final.
‘In those 10 years under Revie, they lost only three times to Manchester United with the Holy Trinity of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. If you weight all the results to three points for a win, they averaged 1.95 points a game from 1965 to 1974, the same as Liverpool for the 10 years from 1976 to 1985.
‘Liverpool won seven league titles and four European Cups. Leeds won two league titles. Forest won the European Cup twice, but Leeds dominated for 10 years. They were the favourites for everything ever year and went hard after every trophy, only to be largely forgotten.’
Revie had become England manager and the 1974-75 season started with the infamous 44 days under Brian Clough. Jimmy Armfield stepped in, persuaded by his friend Revie to leave Bolton to calm the Leeds storm.
By the final whistle in the Parc des Princes, however, even Armfield, revered as one of the gentlemen of English football, found his diplomacy tested.
‘I’d never seen my dad so angry after a match,’ says Duncan Armfield, one of his sons. ‘He was good at accepting defeat. He loved the game and if he was beaten by a a better team there would be no malice. Like when he didn’t play in the 1966 World Cup final, he said it was far better that we won.
‘Dad was fuming. He took his piddly little medal and threw it on the floor. He knew something wasn’t right and for me to see him like that, I knew something was wrong. He was more upset for the fans and the players.
‘He had pulled them back up the league and they had played brilliantly to beat Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona in the semi-finals. Leeds were the best team in Europe. They felt cheated and that feeling of disappointment lasted a long time.’
Armfield’s medal was recovered from the dressing-room floor and there are plans for it to go on display as part of his collection in the National Football Museum.
Travelling Leeds fans did not take the result well. They started to break up the stadium and throw seats after Bayern scored, and rioted into the night. Leeds legend Bobby Collins was caught up in the fighting outside the ground and beaten up.
There is another perspective on it all. Bjorn Andersson was 23 and only 10 months into his career at Bayern Munich when a sickening challenge by Terry Yorath left him writhing in pain in the fourth minute.
Uli Hoeness, later president of Bayern but then their centre forward, described it as the worst tackle he had seen and the grainy footage supports his case. Had there been VAR, Leeds would certainly have played most of the final with 10 men.
‘Everything in my knee was destroyed,’ Andersson tells Mail Sport from his home in Sweden. ‘There were a lot of emotions. Walking out of the tunnel, I can remember the Leeds players talking tough and aggressively.
‘I was not afraid, but I had a feeling they were angry and that this might be their way of getting up for the game.
‘Our tactical plan was for me to play against Billy Bremner and keep him out of the game. After two minutes, I get an elbow in my eye from Billy. It took a minute or so before I could see normally again and then Terry Yorath came flying into my knee and my European Cup final crashed. It was a big, big, big injury.’
Andersson was carried off and didn’t make the medal ceremony, never receiving one. He took painkillers to get through the post-match banquet and went directly to hospital in Munich, staying there for four weeks. He spent eight weeks in plaster.
His surgeon told him he would never play again. ‘That was difficult to hear,’ says Andersson. ‘I can remember thinking there was no reason to live. Football was everything for me.’
Nobody visited from Bayern other than Hoeness, who had also been injured in the final and was regularly at the same hospital. The club even withheld more than half of Andersson’s win bonus as he only played four minutes.
Andersson did play again. He made the bench for the 1976 European Cup final against Saint-Etienne, when Bayern completed the hat-trick, and played in the Intercontinental Cup final of 1976 against Cruzeiro of Brazil, before accepting he would never be the same player again.
He returned to Sweden, where he became a teacher and played part-time before working in youth development and education with the Swedish FA, nurturing young players like Fredrik Ljungberg.
Now he has two artificial knees and holds no malice. ‘When you are 73 and you can walk and laugh and enjoy life, you cannot look back on the bad things,’ he says.
‘I’ve read Terry Yorath has regret about my injury, but I was never angry with him. That would not help anybody. It was a hot thing for me at the time. I was on the way to becoming a very good player and was normal after that.
‘It’s no problem to speak about it, but I don’t remember anything about the game that happened after my injury. They said Leeds were the best team on the day, but I don’t know about that.’
Leeds flew home to a rapturous reception, tens of thousands of fans lining the streets, but it would never be the same again.
Giles left for West Brom that summer. Bremner and Hunter left a year later for Hull and Bristol City respectively. Bayern tried to buy Jordan. Leeds refused to let him go, but the trend was set. The break-up of the team was reinforced by a ban from European competitions for the rioting, reduced on appeal to two years.
‘We could have replaced those great players with equally top-class players if we had won the European Cup,’ says Gray. ‘We could have gone on. It could have been a different story.’
Fifty years on and Bayern remain among the aristocrats of European football, while Leeds have been through good times and bad. They are upwardly mobile once again, though, heading back to the Premier League, but they still sing about the night they were robbed of their finest hour.
