In the summer of 1991, Leeds manager Howard Wilkinson was interviewed by a Yorkshire television reporter about the signing of Eric Cantona, who had recently arrived across the English Channel all but bearing a Handle With Care stamp. Cantona was an oddity: imperious, impetuous and, not to put too fine a point on it, French.
Hard to know now whether the moment was staged or down to the inspired impudence of the television reporter but either way he had the cheek to ask Wilkinson about his reasons for signing Cantona in French rather than English.
Wilkinson didn’t so much as blink and offered a careful but comfortable reply of his own, his French carrying the Sheffield infusions of his childhood. The reporter enthused that he must be able to communicate with Cantona fairly well.
“Well, I can understand him more easily than Gordon Strachan and Gary McAllister,” Wilkinson said drily.
It sometimes feels as though the history of football began in 1992, when Teddy Sheringham scored the very first Premier League goal
Nine months later, Leeds United were the champions of England: the very last winners of the old First Division, as English football was repackaged and re-issued as a brighter, glossier version of itself, moving rapidly away from the dark 1980s under the dubious premise of inviting the people to pay to watch televised football games they used to see for free.
It worked. The money poured in, the shady tycoons arrived and two decades later the product has been transformed.
During last April’s brouhaha over the daft European Super league proposal, it was significant that Leeds United were not, of course, among the six big powerbrokers of English football. Above all old establishment clubs, they struggled over the past two decades to make sense of the fact that the old league wasn’t so much on the crest of a wave as a tsunami of money.
They borrowed desperately to try and match the pace and investment of their old rivals and gargantuan opponents from across The Pennines, Manchester United.
Cantona is the fascinating link between the radically divergent fortunes of both clubs. That ‘92 league title won by Leeds has remained a strangely obscure reference point. Liverpool’s 1990 league success, for instance, remained under a constant spotlight as the club spent 30 years trying to acquire its next and that year became a touchstone, a fading beacon until the Klopp resurgence.
But there was a clean line drawn between those titles won before the Premier League was drawn up.
The original
It sometimes feels as though the history of football began in 1992, when Teddy Sheringham scored the very first Premier League goal - for Nottingham Forest, who were playing Liverpool. All of the original Sky baubles were already in place: Richard Keyes as dressed by Alan Partridge and the glassy-Scots co-commentary of Andy Gray. It became the sound of afternoon Sundays in the 1990s.
Wilkinson clearly had a keen sense of what Cantona was about when he signed him. “He reads poetry,” he shrugged. “He reads philosophy. He thinks. He likes fishing. Yeah. Maybe that’s different. I hope he is different on the field.”
He was and gloriously so. Cantona was a luxurious adornment rather than a central piece in Leeds' title winning winter of 1991-92 but had done enough to convince Alex Ferguson, swapping Leeds for Manchester just before Christmas 1992-93. The four and a half years he spent at Old Trafford served as a generous helping of blotter acid on the Premier League's new audience: Cantona was an industry and an amazement all on his own, thrilling and combustible and gloriously indifferent to public perception or opinion.
Leeds United versus Manchester United has a retrospective feel about it
He remains outside of everything: one of the great football moments of recent years took place in the auditorium in Monaco when he picked up an Uefa president’s awards and told an obviously baffled Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, among others: “As flies to wanton boys we are for the gods. They kill us for ze sport.
“Soon the science will not only be able to throw down the aging of the cells. Soon they will fix the cells. And so we become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars will still kill us. But unfortunately crimes and wars will multiply. I love football! Thank you.”
Beat that.
While United continued to flourish in the years after Cantona continued to explore what it is to move through the world, Leeds United fell out of Division One and veered towards financial extinction and seemed set to be a casualty of the new order.
But it never stopped being a giant club. Few English teams have travelled through the generations and the imagination like Don Revie’s Leeds, whose triumphant sides have been the source of documentaries, fiction and non-fiction books and a major film treatment. Has any other team made the same impression on popular culture?
Imagination
The great John Giles was asked about what he thought of the David Peace book The Damned United (An English Fairy Story), a fictive treatment of Brian Clough's doomed 44 day period in charge at Elland Road. Understandably, Giles disliked and perhaps even resented what was an invented portrayal of a season he and his team-mates had lived through.
But the feel of that period and those dressing rooms come to life on the pages. And how many other teams – in any sport – have ever inspired such a feverish work of imagination? If nothing else, the book was just another validation of the imprint Giles and his crew made on popular culture.
A clear sign of Leeds' renaissance was the release two seasons ago of the Amazon documentary on the energy and momentum flowing through the club under the ministrations of Marcelo Bielsa, the latest in the club's tradition of contrarian managers.
In addition to guiding the club back to the top flight after a 16-year absence, Bielsa has charmed Leeds fans silly by inconspicuously blending into the city community, renting an unflashy flat in Wetherby, walking to work, regularly spotted in Sainsbury’s or the local bakery. The Leeds side-streets that you slip down, indeed. And behind the Argentine’s resolutely low-key persona is a determination to commit to a campaign of gung-ho football revolving around devil-may-care attacking verve.
Leeds returned to the big time last year hoping, like all arrivistes, to survive the season and were a storming success. They finished ninth.
In 2021, they are different to United in that their honour roll is modest and almost entirely compressed into the Revie era of big coats and sideburns and the truly gorgeous white-track suits which made a generation of 1970s teenage boys swoon and pledge themselves to Elland Road for good.
But they are the same, too, in that historically and spiritually, they belong in the same company and on the same field -as they are this lunchtime for a classic opening Saturday of the new football season.
Leeds United versus Manchester United has a retrospective feel about it, redolent of the smoggy winter skies and the spite and authenticity of the old first division, when the world wasn’t watching but the two cities couldn’t get enough.
There is something wonderful about the fact that it is back again. The cities and teams have vastly different expectations since Cantona signed the contract that saw him exit one for the other, with sweeping consequences.
Dreams of another league title are beyond the scope of Leeds. But tripping up United in the quest for theirs would be quite enough for now.
