Paris 1975 – The final we can’t forget
Friday, 24th Oct 2025 09:16 by Tim Whelan
The film is billed as “The European Cup Final Football Tried to Forget that football tried to forget”, but in our little corner of West Yorkshire the bitterness lingers on, about the way we were cheated in the biggest game in Leeds United’s history.
No one could describe me a great film buff, and a film really has to grab my attention before I’m going to make the effort to get to a cinema as soon as it comes out. But ‘Paris 1975’ was always going to be one to get me out of the house and make the effort to get to one of the limited number of screenings earlier this week.
Looking back, I always think of 1975 being the fault line that ran down the middle of the decade. That summer I finished primary school and began my secondary education, and it was also the last year that glam rock would be a force at the top of the charts, before giving way to new wave and punk. The Vietnam war came to an end, and the tory party elected it’s first female leader.
Perhaps Cambodia’s Pol Pot had the right idea when he declared that 1975 was ‘year zero’, after which nothing was going to be the same. And for Leeds fans of a certain age, it was of course the final fling of the great side that Don Revie put together, before too many of them started to find their best years were behind them, and we went into a steady decline.
So that European Cup final was always going to be the last opportunity for most those players to win European club football’s highest honour, they one trophy they coveted most of all. Billy Bremner was to say later that it should have been the greatest night of his career, but the game has been shrouded in controversy ever since, with much speculation as to why the referee gave such a poor performance.
Thoughtfully the cinema played ‘Fox on the run’ by The Sweet as the final piece of music before the programme started, as if to get us in the mood for all things 1975. And when it began the film swept me right back to the anticipation of watching the game as an excited 11 year-old glory hunter, from the safety of my parents’ living room in Essex.
Of course the fans appearing in the film are slightly older, then in their late teens or early twenties who still managed to scrape together the funds to follow Leeds away through all the rounds of that competition, and finally to Paris. Three men and three women, including published authors Gary Edwards and Heidi Haigh, who are still regulars at Elland Road today.
They give us a valuable insight into the frequently scary business of following your team away from home in those days, and the film also has a lot of cine film of the continental trips that season, shot by the fans themselves. Though sadly it doesn’t look as good on today’s HD screens as well as it would have done on the projectors of the time.
And there are also contributions from two of the surviving players from that side, Allan Clarke and Paul Reaney. The latter sounding as combative as ever, displaying a masterclass in shutting down awkward questions, such as the one about Terry Yortath’s fourth minute tackle, which would have earned him a straight red card today.
Clarke tells a story I’d never heard before, that when he was in a restaurant with Peter Lorimer they were approached by a man who told them that for Leeds to win the final we would have to offer the referee more than Bayern would. They thought he was bluffing and never heard from him again, but it does serve up a theory as to why the match was refereed in the way it was.
The footage of the final itself is a reminder of how Leeds dominated at least the first hour of the game, when it seemed only a matter of time before we would get the breakthrough. But two clear penalty appeals were waved away in the first half, both concerning Franz Beckenbauer. Firstly when he scooped the ball away with his hand, then when he wrapped both legs around those of Allan Clarke when Sniffer was about to shoot.
But our patience finally snapped in the second half, when a Lorimer thunderbolt was disallowed after Billy Bremner had been shoved into an offside position by a defender. It could hardly be said that Bremner was interfering with play, and the linesman had run back to the halfway line when Beckenbauer directed the referee to disallow the goal. Which amazingly, he did.
If the goal had stood we would undoubtedly have gone on to win the game, but the chaos seemed to sap our momentum, and Bayern were to steal the game with two late goals. Which was too much for the fans who remembered Lorimer’s disallowed goal in the 1967 FA Cup semi-final, Ray Tinkler in 1971 and the scandal in Salokika.
This was an injustice too far, and the game finished with seats and other missiles raining down on the area behind Sepp Maier’s goal, before the local riot police arrived to employ their customary lack of restraint. The funniest part of the film is the bit when the Germans are foolish enough to try to parade the trophy past the Leeds end on their lap of ‘honour’, before showing cowardice in the face of the enemy.
For the record, Frank Gray was the one member of our team who did win a European Cup medal later in his career, as part of the Nottingham Forest side who beat Hamburg in 1980. For the rest it was a case of what might have been and Allan Clarke is shown saying that he’ll never forget the moment that Beckenbauer brought him down in the box.
UEFA were predictably furious that their showpiece occasion had been ruined by the violence and gave Leeds a four year ban from European Competition. Though they also ended the practise of always giving the final to a referee from the host country, which we can at least take as an admission that their choice of official turned out to be deeply suspect.
The length of our ban seemed like half a lifetime to the eleven year old me at the time. It was in the years to come that I learned that following a football team wasn’t always as glamourous as my experience up to that point since I’d latched onto Leeds in 1970, and by the time I made it to Leeds University in 1982 we were in the second division.
I’ve despised Bayern ever since that night and the 1976 final found me supporting St.Ettienne, but again the Munich side were to prevail despite being outplayed for much of the game. In my trips to Germany in later years I found I wasn’t alone in disliking them, as they’re a kind of Teutonic version of Manchester United, with fans in every part of the country but reviled by those who follow their local team.
It's wasn’t until the 2000/1 season that we had a sniff of revenge, when O’Leary to Leeds to the semi-final of the Champions League against Valencia. Once again we would have Bayern in the final, and I was praying that we’d be outplayed but beat them through a hugely controversial decision in our favour. But once again, it wasn’t to be.
_Tim Whelan_
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