For Leeds United supporters, the birth of the Premier League was supposed to be a celebration.
They had just watched their team win the final First Division title, beating Manchester United to the championship in 1991-92. Gordon Strachan, Gary Speed, David Batty, Gary McAllister and Tony Dorigo had become champions of England.
Then the new league began, and something felt immediately different.
Rocco Dean, who was a young Leeds supporter during the 1992-93 season and has since written about it, remembers an atmosphere that was difficult to reconcile with the club’s status.
“The first game of the season against Wimbledon, we were champions of England and there were about 25,000 people there,” Dean told Football Presse.
“You think about that now and it’s just bizarre. There were about 5,000 empty seats. It was the first game of the new Premier League season, and we'd just won the league. You'd expect Elland Road to be absolutely packed.”
The attendance was not an isolated disappointment. Leeds averaged 29,228 for their Premier League home matches, placing fourth in the division, but the figure was still well below the stadium’s capacity and below what many expected after the title triumph.
The contrast became even more striking during Europe.
Leeds' first Champions League home match against Stuttgart attracted 20,457 spectators. The ground was restricted because of ongoing work and European requirements, but Dean remembers that even with the reduced capacity, thousands of seats remained empty.
“That was the thing that really surprised me,” he said. “We'd won the league, we'd qualified for the Champions League, and yet the stadium wasn't full. It wasn't like now, where you have to fight to get a ticket. There were empty seats everywhere.”
The football itself was changing too.
Dean remembers the early Premier League as a period when supporters were being told repeatedly that everything was becoming bigger and better. Sky Sports was transforming how matches were presented, foreign players were arriving in greater numbers, stadiums were being rebuilt and the old First Division was being repackaged as a new product.
But inside Elland Road, the experience remained much less polished.
“Sky were always talking about how football was changing,” Dean said. “The Premier League was going to be this massive thing, and suddenly everything was different. But going to Elland Road wasn't an event. It was just going to watch Leeds.
“It was still quite raw. There wasn't this engineered atmosphere where somebody was telling you when to sing or trying to get everybody involved. If the atmosphere was good, it was because people genuinely wanted to make it good.”
That atmosphere could be extraordinary on the right night.
The European campaign gave supporters something to cling to while the league season began to unravel. Leeds lost 3-0 away to Stuttgart in September, then produced one of the great European comebacks in the club's history by winning the return fixture 4-1.
The subsequent replay in Barcelona and the two matches against Rangers created five memorable nights in a campaign that otherwise became increasingly difficult to watch.
Dean attended the home match against Rangers in November and remembers the intensity more than the result.
“The Rangers game was incredible,” he said. “It was one of those nights where you knew before kick-off that something was going to happen. There was Mark Hateley, Ally McCoist, all these big names, and the atmosphere was just unbelievable.
“You could feel how much it meant to everybody. It wasn't just another European game. It was Rangers, it was Leeds, and there was all that history and rivalry behind it.”
Leeds lost both matches against Rangers and were eliminated from Europe. At home, however, they remained difficult to beat.
They finished the league season with eight wins, eight draws and only one defeat at Elland Road. Away from home they failed to win once, losing 14 of their 21 matches.
That created a peculiar experience for supporters.
Leeds could beat Tottenham 5-0 in August, Arsenal 3-0 in November and Sheffield Wednesday 3-1 in December, but the team increasingly looked incapable of carrying that form beyond Yorkshire.
“You'd go to Elland Road and think, right, we're going to win today,” Dean said. “And quite often they did. But then you'd go away and it was almost like watching a different team. They just couldn't get going.
“That was what made it so frustrating. You knew the players were good enough. You'd seen them win the league. You'd seen them play Stuttgart off the park. But suddenly they were losing games everywhere and getting dragged towards the bottom.”
By the end of the season, the mood had changed completely.
The champions had finished 17th, one place above relegation. The average supporter had gone from celebrating a title to worrying about whether Leeds would remain in the new Premier League at all.
Yet Dean believes the supporters also witnessed something historically important.
They were watching the beginning of modern football: the first Premier League season, the arrival of Sky's influence, the changing stadiums, the growing internationalisation of squads and the beginning of football's transformation into a global entertainment industry.
Leeds simply happened to experience that transformation from the most uncomfortable position possible.
“They were champions, but suddenly it felt like they were being left behind,” Dean said. “The game was changing around them, and the fans were experiencing all of that for the first time as well.
“Looking back, that's what makes the season so interesting. It wasn't just Leeds having a bad year. It was the start of a completely different era, and Leeds were right in the middle of it.”
Rocco Dean's book "Sgt Wilko's defending champions" is from Pitch Publishing - which is available here.
