Forty-four days. No spell in Leeds United history has been picked over, dramatised and argued about quite like the one that began at the end of July 1974 and ended on 12 September the same year. Brian Clough at Leeds United is the shortest significant managerial reign the club has had, and comfortably the most famous — a story that produced a bestselling novel, a feature film, a legendary live television ambush and a set of grudges that outlasted almost everyone involved.
Here is what actually happened, stripped of the mythology.
Why Leeds needed a manager at all
Because Don Revie left. Having built Leeds from a struggling Second Division side into the champions of England — a title won in 1973/74 with just four defeats all season — Revie accepted the England job in July 1974. He left behind a squad of hardened internationals who had been together for a decade, who were fiercely loyal to him, and who had just been crowned the best team in the country. Our guide to the Don Revie era explains exactly how tight that group had become.
Replacing a manager like that was always going to be difficult. Leeds then chose the one candidate in English football guaranteed to make it impossible.
Brian Clough at Leeds United: the worst possible appointment
Brian Clough was, at 39, the most exciting young manager in the country. He had taken Derby County from the Second Division to the First Division title in 1971/72, walked out on them in October 1973 after a row with the board, and was managing Brighton & Hove Albion in the Third Division when Leeds came calling.
He was also Leeds United’s loudest and most persistent public critic. For years Clough had used newspaper columns and television appearances to attack the way Revie’s side played — the gamesmanship, the disciplinary record, the sense that Leeds bent the rules and got away with it. He had said, in print, that they deserved to be demoted for their conduct. Every senior player in that dressing room knew it word for word.
Leeds appointed him anyway, in July 1974, on the recommendation of a board who wanted a big name and a clean break. Clough took charge at the end of the month.
The first meeting
The most repeated moment of the entire 44 days is Clough’s opening address to the squad, in which he told the players that they could throw their medals away because they had not won them fairly. Accounts of the exact wording vary, and it has been embellished over the years by retelling, but the substance is not disputed by anyone who was in the room: the new manager opened by telling the reigning champions that their achievements did not count.
Whatever the intention — a deliberate shock, a clearing of the air, simple bloody-mindedness — the effect was immediate. He had lost most of the dressing room in a single afternoon, including the captain, Billy Bremner, and senior figures such as Johnny Giles, Norman Hunter and Peter Lorimer. Giles had himself been a candidate for the job, which did not help.
The football
It did not go well on the pitch either. Clough’s first competitive match was the Charity Shield against Liverpool at Wembley on 10 August 1974 — the first to be played at the national stadium — and it ended in defeat on penalties. It is remembered instead for Bremner and Kevin Keegan being sent off for fighting, both pulling their shirts off as they left the field, and both subsequently receiving lengthy suspensions.
In the league, the champions won one of their first six matches and sat in the relegation places. Clough brought in his own men — John McGovern and John O’Hare, both from his Derby side, and the maverick forward Duncan McKenzie from Nottingham Forest — but McGovern in particular was given a torrid reception by supporters who saw him as an outsider parachuted in ahead of established favourites.
12 September 1974
The board acted quickly. Clough was dismissed on 12 September 1974, 44 days after taking charge, with a severance payment widely reported at around £98,000 — a sum that, as he later noted with some relish, set him up rather nicely.
That same evening came the scene that sealed the story’s place in football folklore: Clough and Revie appearing together on Yorkshire Television, interviewed by Austin Mitchell, in an exchange that was tense, personal and utterly compelling. Revie asked why Clough had taken a job at a club he had spent years running down. Clough, unrepentant, said he had wanted to build a side even better than Revie’s. Neither man gave an inch.
What happened next — to both of them
Leeds turned to Jimmy Armfield, a calmer figure who rebuilt relations with the squad and, remarkably, took the club to the European Cup final within a year. Leeds lost that 1975 final 2-0 to Bayern Munich in Paris amid furious disputes over refereeing decisions, and the club’s supporters were banned from European competition for the crowd trouble that followed. Our full history of Leeds United in Europe covers that night in detail.
Clough, meanwhile, took over at Nottingham Forest in January 1975, won promotion, won the First Division title in 1977/78 at the first attempt, and then won the European Cup in 1979 and 1980. He became, by most measures, the greatest English manager never to manage England — a job that, as it happens, went to Revie and ended badly for him too.
The Damned United and the long afterlife
The story would probably have faded without David Peace’s 2006 novel The Damned Utd, a fictionalised account of the 44 days written from inside Clough’s head, and the 2009 film adaptation starring Michael Sheen. Both were commercial successes. Both were also disputed: Johnny Giles took legal action over his portrayal and secured changes and an apology, and members of the Clough family objected strongly to the book’s depiction of him. Neither is a documentary, and neither should be read as one.
What is beyond argument is the scale of the miscalculation. Leeds had the best squad in England and appointed the one man that squad could never accept. Within two years the great side had broken up. The club would not win another league title until 1992, a story told in our explainer on the last time Leeds United won the league, and the full record of what the club has won is set out in our list of every Leeds United trophy.
Fifty-two years on, the 44 days remain the great what-if of Elland Road. Leeds’ full top-flight record is available on the Premier League’s Leeds United club page, and the club’s historical results and managerial records are catalogued by BBC Sport.
