With the football season fast approaching, fans young and old will be looking forward to getting their hands on their club’s new kit.
But Leeds United supporters have to contend with the beloved white of their home shirt being blemished with their most hated colour: red.
Fans have been appalled this month to find the colours of their historic rivals Manchester United have found their way on to the kit, by way of their team’s new sponsor, Red Bull.
The energy drink’s logo, two red bulls locking horns in front of a yellow background, now emblazons the 2024-25 home kit, designed by Adidas.
If the Man United link was not bad enough, red is also the colour of the Lancaster rose, while Yorkshire’s rose is white.
Such is the distaste among Leeds fans for the colour red that a former sponsor, 23red, designed a blue logo especially for the team’s shirt. The McDonald’s restaurant next to the Elland Road ground is thought to be the only one with red removed from its branding.
leeds united mcdonald's (date unknown)
— nonstandard mcdonald's (@nonstandardmcd) April 22, 2021
elland road, leeds, uk
standardized (disembodied legs and other football decor removed)
submitted by @gaRAge1992 pic.twitter.com/iZWrad0Bsl
Daniel Chapman, who writes the Leedsista newsletter and is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller 100 Years of Leeds United, theorised that the hatred of red may simply come from a sense of fans losing control over the club they love.
“It’s maybe less about colours mattering more than they used to, more a feeling that there are fewer things about football that do matter,” he said. “It’s similar to how fans latch on to local players, like Archie Gray at Leeds.
“Something that used to be a commonplace connection with the team that represents you has become rare, so its importance is inflated alongside a precarious fear of where football is going: that this might be the last player we feel kinship with, the last shirt that has the colours we recognise as ours.”
But the anti-red sentiment seems like a “relatively recent addition” to the culture of Leeds United fans, according to Simon Rix, the Kaiser Chiefs bassist and a third of the BBC Leeds United podcast Don’t Go to Bed Just Yet.
He said: “At a particular time, a lovely red Porsche jumper was one of my prize possessions but, even if it wasn’t several sizes too small, I wouldn’t wear that out of the house now. Or drive a red car. Or play a red bass, though I do have some faded to pink ones.”
Leeds fans are not the first group to have their backs put up by what they see as colour transgressions.
Fans of Southampton FC last year used an ancient court process, which may date back 1,000 years, to try to get the Itchen Bridge lights switched from the colours of their fierce rivals Portsmouth FC.
In 2015, 100 litres of unwanted red paint due to be used on Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower was given away after an angry reaction to the proposed red and white colour scheme that mirrored Southampton’s colours.
In 2022, Amnesty International got involved after plans to use the Saudi colours in the Newcastle strip were leaked.
