Football’s weirdest rivalries: The reasons these clubs hate each other
08 February 2025 6:06am GMT
The FA Cup fourth-round tie between Leeds United and Millwall has been scheduled for a brunchtime 12.15pm kick-off on Saturday because of police concerns. The worry is that the simmering rivalry between the two sets of supporters would be exacerbated by lengthy drinking time in the pubs adjacent to Elland Road.
Historic tension, it is felt, will be lessened if this were a sober encounter. Yet while we might understand such restrictions being in force when Celtic meet Rangers or Spurs take on Arsenal, Leeds against Millwall has none of the standard engines of football enmity. There is no geographical reason for the mutual dislike, no sectarian undercurrent, and the two clubs have rarely if ever been in simultaneous contention for silverware. This is an antagonism born of something else. And it is by no means the only unlikely feud in English football.
Leeds v Millwall
If Leeds’s mutual loathing of Chelsea was born on the pitch after two sets of players kicked lumps out of each other in the 1970 FA Cup final, this rivalry festered in the stands. The two clubs had barely encountered each other before they found themselves simultaneously in League One in 2007. Both clubs wear their widespread dislike by other sides as a badge of honour: no one likes them and they don’t care. In a sense this was a race to the bottom, a scrap to determine who is most loathed. And that season, the two league encounters were scarred with the violence of one-upmanship.
It carried on into the following season, when Millwall beat Leeds in the League One play-off semi-final thanks to Jimmy Abdou’s goal at Elland Road. Every meeting since has had a gritty edge, soundtracked by tragedy chanting. Millwall’s supporters antagonise their opponents by singing about Gary Speed, Jimmy Savile and the Istanbul murders. The Leeds response latterly has been to chant about the death of Millwall’s chairman in a car crash in 2023. Such is the fear of trouble by the police, they have previously forced Millwall to hand out match tickets at a service station in Yorkshire to deter hooligans from attending.
The toxic atmosphere, however, seems to stir the players. This is a rivalry littered with dramatic matches, like when Millwall won 4-3 at Elland Road in 2018, or when Leeds won 3-2 a year later and again in 2020. And the moment they were drawn together in the FA Cup, police insisted on as early a kick-off as possible.
Coventry v Sunderland
This most unexpected footballing fissure was entirely the responsibility of one man: Jimmy Hill. The bold campaigner who fought against the maximum wage and invented football punditry was not above bending the rules to his advantage. Not least on the final day of the 1976-77 season, an occasion Sky TV would have loved.
Three teams were in danger of filling the last relegation place out of the top flight. To make matters more dramatic, two of them, Coventry and Bristol City, were playing each other at Highfield Road. Meanwhile Sunderland were away at Everton. Whatever the result at Goodison, Sunderland knew they would stay up should either of the two teams fighting it out in the west Midlands lose.
Hill, then the managing director of Coventry, appreciated that the mathematical permutations would be made significantly simpler for his team if they knew the result of the Everton game in advance. So he contrived to delay kick-off by 15 minutes, claiming spurious traffic congestion. Then, with the two City clubs locked in a tense draw, the moment he became aware of it he ordered the result from Merseyside to be displayed on the stadium big screen.