In his latest column for leedsunited.com, lifelong supporter Jon Howe looks back to the last time Leeds United started life back in the top-flight, after winning the Second Division.

Howe is the author of two books on the club, 2015 hit ‘The Only Place For Us: An A-Z History of Elland Road’ and ‘All White: Leeds United’s 100 Greatest Players’ in 2012.



It was the perfect day. For many, it set the benchmark for what the archetypal ‘Leeds United’ season opener should be. And 30 years later it still radiates positivity. Glorious sun, Leeds utterly resplendent in a bright yellow away kit, and a win on our travels against a club still considered to be top flight royalty. This was Leeds triumphantly returning to the top table of English football, and finally it all made sense.

The 3-2 win over Everton on the opening day of the 1990/91 season was everything a Leeds fan had dreamed of, after eight years of purgatory in the Second Division and a summer paralysed with nerves over whether we could cut it. David Batty remarked post-match about the pristine quality of the Goodson Park pitch. Indeed he had honed his craft on barren and rutted park pitches and the grassless wastelands of English football in the 1980s, not least at Elland Road and Fullerton Park. This was Batty moving up a notch. This was Leeds United navigating the precarious balance between natural confidence, naïve bravado and a reckless bolt into the unknown. This was everything they deserved.

None of the three goals Leeds scored that day were a thing of beauty. Their critics would argue they were textbook Wilkinson; scruffy, bullish, artless and opportunistic. To Leeds fans it barely mattered. Eight years away had skewed expectations. To a generation of fans – including myself – there was little recollection of Leeds as a top flight club, only a vague appreciation that this was where Leeds belonged, and that was mainly based on generational hearsay. From being dethroned by the likes of Shrewsbury Town and Oxford United and struggling to succumb Port Vale and Oldham Athletic, we had no idea how to lock horns with the country’s elite.

From the chaotic euphoria of 1989/90 came a sobering reality when the fixtures came out. Everton away followed by Manchester United at home. It was what you had always wanted but the genuine article written on paper seemed a more daunting prospect altogether. And yet Everton were swept aside by a juggernaut in yellow, the might of which even Leeds fans had underestimated. In truth, there were many less accommodating fixtures Leeds could have been presented with. Having won the league title twice in the mid-80s, Everton were a club in transition; epitomised most colourfully by Neville Southall’s half-time sit-in as he vacated the dressing room early to park himself against the goalposts in front of the gleeful Leeds fans in the away end. Southall was one of the most esteemed characters in the English game, and while there were undoubtedly underlying factors, Leeds’ ruthless first half display had ground him down.

If Leeds fans wanted to see this as a changing of the guard in English football they would perhaps have been jumping the gun a little, but in hindsight that’s exactly what it was. From 2-0 at half-time courtesy of a Chris Fairclough header from Batty’s long throw, and Gary Speed capitalising on a defensive mix-up, Leeds’ collective delirium hit new heights as Imre Varadi pounced on a loose ball to tap in a third from close range. Two Everton goals and a frantic late rally couldn’t knock the sheen off a landmark day for the young bucks of Leeds United. This was a statement, and yet it was just the beginning.

English football changed forever in the summer of 1990, and not just because Leeds United got promoted. England’s exploits in the World Cup re-awoke a nation to the purity and joy of football, after more than a decade of austerity, internal politics, only negative media interest, relentless hooliganism and a Prime Minister hell bent on ensuring football fans were labelled as national pariahs.  

To announce yourself as a Leeds United fan in 1990 was to openly invite a tidal wave of scourge and derision. In many ways, nothing has changed. And whilst that’s just how we like it, in the pre-Premier League era the boundless thrill and the undiluted pleasure of football had been beaten out of you. But the summer of 1990 changed all that, particularly for Leeds United fans. It was like two worlds collided and the beatific landscape of youth culture was also changing, to open up a blissful new age of Elysian collectivism and loved-up buoyancy. The Leeds snarl had gone, and the insignia of achievement was a picture perfect image of David Batty in a yellow ‘Top Man’ shirt which positively glowed on a baking hot day in August.

The 1990/91 season was built on that momentum, and the recognition – from that win at Everton – that Leeds had figuratively and literally moved up a gear. The aggressive bombast of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ as the run-out music at Elland Road had been replaced by the ‘Chariots of Fire’ theme tune, as if recognising the grace and splendour of our new status and surroundings and the symbolic passing of the baton from a Vinnie Jones to a Gary McAllister.

Many fans would place that 1990/91 season on a par with the promotion campaign which preceded it and the title-winning triumph that followed. That might not make much sense given it resulted in a mere fourth-placed finish and no European football, but it was the size of the statement which meant the most. It was the realisation that this momentum was real, and the hearsay you’d grown bored of that Leeds could mix it with the best, wasn’t just groundless blather.

Football has changed immeasurably again since 1990. And Leeds United vacated the Premier League in 2004 at the worst possible time, just before it was jettisoned into another stratosphere of TV money and sponsorship. I read once that in their 14-year stint in the top flight - during which they won the league and earned eight other top five finishes - Leeds earned less than Cardiff City did in the 2013-14 season-alone for finishing 20^th.

It is a different league in 2020 in every sense, but there are comparisons if you want them; a manager we trust implicitly to get it right and a spirited Leeds side with a locally-born anchor patrolling midfield and who will take to the top flight like he was born to master it.

But perhaps the most salient point and the most compelling comparison is that rival clubs will always be vulnerable when Leeds are underestimated, and there are plenty of clubs, plenty of ‘Evertons’, who could still fall foul of that. We’ve got plenty of catching up to do, but when the wheels are in motion it’s amazing how much ground we can cover. And Leeds United with a point to prove, is Leeds United at its most dangerous.