Champions League 2001: Leeds United vs 1860 Munich
The main show came from Costas Kapitanis. The Champions League had been the Peacocks' aim for a decade, or three, and achieving it meant remembering the bad times Leeds had in Europe in the 1970s.
2025/26 season marks 25 years since Leeds United were playing in the Champions League, and even if it does feel like yesterday, it's worth going back to check what happened.
Throughout this season I'll be writing about the Champions League campaign game by game, roughly around the anniversary of each match.
It begins, before the Champions League even begins properly, below.
This is instinct: distrusting early August football, playing before the league season is played. It feels like pre-season. It is pre-season. It's also everything your club has been working towards since 1992, the last time it played in the European Cup, when it was on the cusp of becoming the Champions League. It's what David Wetherall worked so hard for, through season after season in Howard Wilkinson's teams, George Graham's teams, finally achieving it while playing in Paul Jewell's Bradford City team. Heading in from Gunnar Halle's free-kick against Liverpool made him the hero of two West Yorkshire cities. Bradford stayed up, and Leeds qualified for Europe's biggest cup.
Leeds had needed that goal because the new century had been turning against them since the Millennium team annuals were stuffed into Christmas stockings. Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate were arrested in January. Christopher Loftus and Kevin Speight were murdered in April. A long UEFA Cup campaign almost took Leeds to the final and back to the glory of the 1970s. It wasn't easy to recover from the horror of the semi-final but Wethers had done his best to help.
Summer, though, was jaded. Gestures at the UEFA Cup through the 1990s had helped Leeds to this point, but there'd been no need for games before September. This match at Elland Road was the Champions League but it was not the Champions League, it was a Champions League qualifier. Should we be glad, or sad? The visitors, 1860 Munich, weren't even the team from Munich we had problems with. If the enemy of our enemy is our friend, we had no problems with them at all.
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