Ask any supporter of a certain age to name the greatest goalscorer in the club’s history and the answer comes back without hesitation. Peter Lorimer at Leeds United was not simply prolific — he was the man with the hardest shot in English football, a teenage prodigy who became a two-time league champion and, more than four decades after he last pulled on the shirt, still sits top of the all-time scoring charts at Elland Road.
This is the story of the boy from Dundee who arrived at Leeds as a 15-year-old and never really left.
The youngest man ever to play for Leeds United
Born in Dundee on 14 December 1946, Lorimer was the most coveted schoolboy footballer in Scotland. Don Revie famously drove north through the night to sign him, beating off a queue of English clubs in the process — a piece of Leeds folklore that says as much about Revie’s determination as it does about the teenager’s reputation.
The payoff was immediate. On 29 September 1962, aged 15 years and 289 days, Lorimer made his first-team debut against Southampton, becoming the youngest player ever to represent the club. That record stood for decades and remains one of the most quoted lines in the story of Revie’s Leeds.
He was not an overnight regular. Lorimer waited until the mid-1960s to establish himself, initially as an out-and-out winger before settling into the wide-right role that defined him — drifting infield, arriving late, and letting fly from anywhere inside 30 yards.
Why they called him ‘Hotshot’
The nickname wrote itself. Lorimer’s right foot was a genuine weapon, his shot reportedly clocked at around 90mph, and the terraces at Elland Road learned to hold their breath the moment the ball dropped to him on the edge of the box. Teammates called him “Lash”. The press called him Hotshot. Goalkeepers, one suspects, called him something else entirely.
What is sometimes forgotten is how complete a footballer sat behind the party trick. Lorimer was a fine crosser, a willing runner and a dead-ball specialist of real quality, capable of scoring free-kicks and penalties as readily as he was of thumping in from open play. In a Leeds side stuffed with internationals, he was the one who turned pressure into goals.
Peter Lorimer at Leeds United: 238 goals and a cabinet full of medals
Across two spells — 1962 to 1979, then a return from 1983 to 1985 — Lorimer made more than 700 appearances in all competitions and scored 238 goals. It is a club record that has never been seriously threatened, and one that sits at the very top of Leeds United’s all-time scoring list.
The medals matched the numbers. Lorimer won the First Division title in 1968-69 and again in 1973-74, the FA Cup in 1972, the League Cup in 1968 and the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in both 1968 and 1971. For a full breakdown of what that generation delivered, our guide to every honour Leeds have won lays it out in order.
He also lived through the near-misses, and none cut deeper than Paris in 1975. In the European Cup final against Bayern Munich, Lorimer volleyed home what looked for all the world like the opening goal, only for the referee to rule it out for offside against captain Billy Bremner. Leeds lost 2-0. More than 50 years on, it is still the decision Leeds supporters argue about most.
Scotland, and a World Cup goal
Lorimer won 21 caps for Scotland and travelled to the 1974 World Cup in West Germany, where he scored in the 2-0 win over Zaire. Scotland went home unbeaten after draws with Brazil and Yugoslavia — eliminated on goal difference, in one of the more painful footnotes in their tournament history.
That he was not capped more often says more about the depth of Scottish football in that era than it does about Lorimer, who was competing with an extraordinary generation of attacking talent.
The return, and a life in Leeds
Lorimer left Elland Road in 1979 and played in North America with Vancouver Whitecaps and Toronto Blizzard, with a spell at York City in between. Then, in 1983, he came back. Leeds were a Second Division side by that point and Lorimer was in his late thirties, but he was still scoring, still striking the ball cleanly, and still the man the crowd wanted on it. He finally retired in 1985.
He never left the city. Lorimer ran a pub in Leeds, worked as a summariser on local radio, wrote a long-running column for the Yorkshire Evening Post and served the club as an ambassador, becoming the bridge between the Revie era and generations of supporters who only knew it from grainy footage. If you went to Elland Road in the 1990s or 2000s, there was every chance you walked past him.
Lorimer died on 20 March 2021 at the age of 74. The tributes that followed — from the club, from teammates, from supporters who had never seen him play — underlined what he had become: not just a record-breaker, but the living link to the best team Leeds United have ever had.
The record that still stands
Modern Leeds sides have produced excellent forwards, and the club’s current crop under Daniel Farke will produce more. But 238 is a long way away. Lorimer played in an era of 60-game seasons, replays and hard grounds, and he scored in all of them, for two decades, in the biggest matches the club has ever played.
Peter Lorimer’s Leeds United career is the benchmark. It is unlikely anyone catches him — and he is a permanent fixture in any version of a Leeds United all-time XI.
