Taking a trip in the Elland Road time-capsule: a ‘charmingly dilapidated’ window into the 1970s 

Words by Nico Biddulph

At the end of January, the Premier League leaders Arsenal came to play Leeds United. Despite not having a ticket, I decided this would be as good a time as any to visit Elland Road for the first time, and see what the stadium and matchday atmosphere was like. If only from outside the ground.

In 2026, this fixture was something of a mismatch: top of the Premier League against sixteenth; one of the league’s wealthiest clubs against a side who have spent two of the last five seasons in the Championship. Given the charmingly dilapidated appearance of Elland Road however, I could quite easily have imagined that this was not the case, that the year was 1971. And that instead of Okafor and Calvert-Lewin, Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles were inside the dressing room preparing to face the Gunners in a top of the table First Division clash. The ground felt quite different to other elite English stadiums. It (fortunately) had none of the uniformity of The King Power or St Mary’s. It lacked the immaculate, unblemished appearances of Wembley and the London Stadium. Even older venues such as Craven Cottage and Villa Park feel less ‘rough-around the edges’, and have cleaned up most of the disrepair which can give grounds a bit of character. At Elland Road, it seemed as if large parts of the stadium had not been updated for decades.

 One of the first things I noticed were the archaic wooden turnstile doors with chipped paint that resembled the entrance to a weather-beaten beach shack. I then wandered round the John Charles West Stand, where a sliver of the pitch was visible through the ambulance tunnel. Once again, I could imagine that, without a full view of the pristine 21st-century grass and of the players in their polyester shirts, this tiny glimpse of green could represent a contest from a bygone era. I swifty moved on to the box office in a desperate, albeit fruitless, attempt to buy a ticket. On the way I passed the outside of the away fans’ area. This was perhaps the most neglected part of the stadium. A tangled mess of wires, pipes and aircon units looked as if they had been hastily tacked onto a patchwork of multicolour sections of brick. Meanwhile, the corrugated roof above completed the imitation of an oversized garden shed. I remained hostage within the 1970s-time-capsule as I walked east up Elland Road, where an imposing brutalist structure curved round to connect the Norman Hunter South Stand with the more recently developed East stand, on which a Hisense advertising board brought me back to the present.

 Whilst this description may sound like criticism, it is really more a series of compliments. The idiosyncratic, collage-like way in which Elland Road is fitted together creates an enchanting feeling. Its confluence of new and old enables a visitor to imagine past eras: times when football was perhaps a more fair and equal game. In the 5 seasons prior to the construction of the Norman Hunter South Stand in 1974, the First Division had been won by five different teams, two of whom had been in the second tier only a decade prior. Arsenal, the visiting team during my visit, were one team able to secure their place in this almost unbreakable modern oligarchy of clubs after benefitting from fortunate timing near the inception of the Premier League: having achieved success just as the league was being created. This is not to entirely downplay their significant achievements, but to emphasise that the divergent fates of Leeds and Arsenal in the recent past were not predestined. They could have been the other way around had just a few different decisions been made by either club in the years following Don Revie’s glory years, or even Leeds’ last league title in 1992. Arsenal’s recent visit – to a ground containing features from the 1950s and housing a once-nationally-dominant club – reminds us that success in football was, in the past, much more achievable for those not already part of the sporting aristocracy.

In early January, Leeds announced plans to expand Elland Road by 15,000 seats. The two oldest parts of the ground, the West and North stands, will soon be no more: set to be replaced by large Anfield-style stands with multiple tiers. Elland Road is a rarity amongst the old-style English grounds in that it is not surrounded on most sides by houses and thus has room to expand. It is surely great news for Leeds fans that this means that they are able to stay at their historic home. There is also talk that the expansion will bring in an extra £15 million annually. It seems, therefore, that increasing the capacity is a good idea economically, and a sign of the club’s ambition – perhaps to return to where it was half a century ago as an elite club. However, it will be sad to see the messiness disappear, the wires and pipes covered up, and the corrugated metal taken to the scrap heap. I would recommend a visit before Elland Road gets transported into the 21st century.