Why Leeds can draw 50,000-plus fans in Ireland: ‘Saturday will feel like a home game’
By Beren Cross
Aug. 8, 2025Updated 3:40 pm GMT+9
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Leeds United will conclude the preparation for their Premier League return 194 miles away from Elland Road, but it will feel like a home game. On Saturday, they face Milan at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, where the majority of the 50,000-plus crowd will be in Leeds colours.
This will feel like a home away from home for Daniel Farke and his side. There is an almost mythical, fanatical connection between the Republic of Ireland and Leeds. The club is like a family heirloom, passed through generations in Limerick, Galway, Cork and every corner of the Emerald Isle.
Why, though? What is it about this football club from West Yorkshire that has so convincingly won hearts and minds on the other side of the Irish Sea?
Like so many, Gerry Lynch inherited the passion from his father, Donal, who had been an avid fan from the 1960s onwards, enraptured by Don Revie’s iconic team.
Lynch was born in Cork in 1981 and grew up in Dublin. He had no say in the matter. After a sister who did not like football and a brother who took to Aston Villa and their Irish contingent, Lynch would be handed the Leeds fan baton.
Leeds fans may recognise Lynch’s name from his channel on YouTube, The Leeds View. That’s his outlet for a passion that began during childhood walks alongside his father, who regaled him with the glory years.
“He would have always talked about this classy image of the all-white kit taken from really wanting Leeds to be like Real Madrid,” he tells The Athletic. “If you’re going to be a top side in Europe and be seen as the best in the world, you’ve got to look like the best in the world.
“They had this pristine white kit, and then you had players like John Giles, who was Irish and was a big hero in Ireland. Then you had the grit and the brawn of Billy Bremner in a hard-hitting Leeds side.
“Leeds were different from everybody else, and Leeds put it up to everyone else. They weren’t the favoured side, and people in England didn’t always like Leeds.
Ger Lynch with his dad, Donal (Ger Lynch)
“That was maybe part of the reason (why Irish people followed Leeds) as well. It’s nice to be following an underdog that can put it up to these teams. Leeds did. It all stems from that.”
Patrick Savage, 32, speaks to The Athletic with a strong Irish accent, but he was born in Bradford. He is a member of the club’s Dublin supporters group, but did not move to the Irish capital until he was eight years old in 2000.
Patrick’s Irish father had moved to Leeds in the 1960s and, like Lynch’s father Donal, fell in love with Revie’s United. As Patrick grew up near the city, he would frequently go to Elland Road with his dad, who also gave him all the best stories from the previous decades.
“He would have got to witness the best Leeds team around (growing up there in the 1960s and ’70s),” he said. “I would get the stories from him, going to the games, queuing up for tickets. He always said he met Revie outside the ground.
“He still talks like it’s a childhood memory for him. We used to go to Peter Lorimer’s pub all the time, and he’d be acting like a little schoolboy around him.”
After the move to Dublin, the trips, inevitably, became less frequent. Still, he had been bitten by the bug. Ireland, he says, is full of generation after generation just like him.
“The connection for us is all through the parents growing up, watching the team in the ’70s and all the Irish players,” he said. “The connection’s really strong.
“You can’t get into a taxi in Dublin without the taxi man being a Leeds fan. It’s impossible. The whole journey home is just chatting to the man about Leeds.”
Gerry McDermott is arguably one of the best-known Leeds fans in Ireland. He says he set up the club’s first supporter groups in Cork, Galway, Dublin and Limerick.
He is 65 now and in that same generation as Lynch and Patrick’s fathers. He did not inherit his Leeds passion from a relative. It came down to picking the team in white when he watched the 1970 FA Cup final, between Leeds and Chelsea, on television as a 10-year-old.
The presence of an Irish legend like Giles only cemented that love as he watched on in awe of what Revie’s side did on the pitch. This is where the generational pull started.
“It’s from grandfathers to their sons and now it’s passed on to their grandsons as well,” he said.
As the 1980s approached, McDermott became old enough to start making his own pilgrimage to Elland Road to see his beloved side in the flesh. It’s a route that has become well-trodden over the years. Taking that trip has become a badge of honour for so many Irish fans.
Like many others, McDermott began with ferries in the 1980s and then transitioned into flights through the mid-1990s and onwards. The increasing convenience of travel between Ireland and Leeds played a significant part in retaining that core of support for decade after decade.
It’s still an expensive and time-consuming endeavour, but for those who have time and money to spare, the trip to Elland Road is a rite of passage. McDermott worked for the supermarket chain Tesco for 42 years and would regularly save up his year’s holiday for a four-week splurge on Leeds United in the UK.
Lynch’s first trip to Elland Road came in May 2005, when Leeds played out a 0-0 draw in the Championship with Rotherham United. It’s a stadium that has kept him coming back. Even when he has failed to get a match ticket, Lynch has journeyed to watch the game on TV in The Old Peacock pub across the road from Elland Road.
McDermott with Gary Speed (Gerry McDermott)
He sees Dublin airport packed with Leeds fans whenever he has flown over on a matchday. There were so many making the trip that you would unexpectedly bump into neighbours, 200 miles from home, he said.
“The Irish following, especially during the League One days, when it was much easier to get tickets for Elland Road… the volume of people was huge,” said Lynch. “You’d be over to see the game and you’d be seeing people you live on the same street with in the ground, but you wouldn’t have told you were going.”
Leeds is a city that has grown to mean everything to Lynch. Like so many families, and not just Irish ones, United brought him closer to his relatives. Those shared experiences are priceless to him, just as visiting Bremner’s statue is to him now.
“My dad and I had some amazing times going,” he said. “We had so much fun. As I got older, as a kid, I got closer to my dad because of the time we spent together going to Leeds games. He passed away eight years ago. There’s a stone beside Billy Bremner’s statue. I got a stone put down for him.
“My dad’s buried in Galway, but I never feel like he’s buried in Galway. I feel like he’s in Leeds because, when I go there, I make sure I go and see the stone and always get a feeling he’s around the ground. There’s just a connection there with it now, to my family and to me.”
Those Elland Road connections will be felt far closer to home, in Dublin, on Saturday.
“In Dublin on Saturday, the stadium will feel like a home game,” said Lynch. It’s a prediction shared by the other fans we speak to.
For McDermott, it’s a crucial moment for the next generation of Irish fans to feel the full force of what this club means. “It’s going to be amazing,” he said. “For me, personally, it’s for the kids, really. I’ve been through it all, but it’s the look on the kids.
“If we can replicate the atmosphere inside the Aviva that you get in Elland Road, can you imagine a 12-year-old or 11-year-old, what his feelings are going to be in the middle of that?
“You’re talking about getting kids into loving football and loving their team and the atmosphere and the noise. Every kid likes that.”
Leeds are the talk of the town. For thousands of natives, this will be their first chance to see the team in the flesh.
Even for those who do not consider themselves Leeds fans, they want to experience the legend first-hand. They have heard all about the atmosphere created inside Elland Road.
“For the fans that can’t realistically afford to do it every season, it’s the beauty of them being able to go to the game, watch Leeds in Ireland and then go home by seven o’clock,” said Patrick. “There’s a serious buzz about it.
“I’ve mates who are reaching out to me asking for tickets. They don’t even support Leeds. They just want to see Leeds play in the Aviva. They know the atmosphere is going to be electric.”
Patrick’s daughter is an example of the next generation of fans coming through. Much in the same way her grandfather was infected by Revie’s Leeds and her dad by the David O’Leary era, the sensory overload of Saturday’s homecoming may be what has her taking her own kids to Elland Road in 30 years.
