Welcome to Goal! In this series, there is one geocache hidden at the stadiums of the Top 20 football clubs in the history of the Premier League (as of the end of 2020). To find the eventual bonus cache, you will have to take note of the bonus numbers on the logbook. Good luck!’
A brief history.
Leeds United Football Club is an English professional football club based in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire. The club was formed in 1919 following the disbanding of Leeds City by the Football League and took over their Elland Road stadium. The club currently competes in thePremier League, the top flight of English Football, following promotion from the EFL Championship during the2019-20 season. Most of their history has been spent competing in the first tier of English football. Their longest continuous spell inside the first tier was a period of 18 years between 1964 and 1982, while their longest period outside of it spanned 16 years between 2004 and 2020.
They have won three English league titles, one FA Cup, one League Cup, two Charity/Community Shields and two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups. The club reached the European Cup Final but were beaten, losing to Bayern Munich. Leeds reached the semi-finals of the tournament's successor, the Champions League in 2001, but were beaten by Valencia. The club were also runners-up in the European Cup Winners Cup final in 1973, losing to Milan. The majority of the honours were won under the management of Don Revie in the 1960’s and 1970’s and Revie was without doubt the greatest manager to have managed the club and was adored by the fans. In May 2012 a commemorative statue was unveiled of Revie and the North Stand was affectionally renamed the Revie Stand.
Under Revie’s tenure Leeds earned the unflattering moniker of “dirty Leeds’, undoubtedly due to their combative nature. Eddie Gray was quoted as saying “it was brutal stuff and definitely win at all costs’. Alan Peacock was also quoted as saying “one of the attractions for playing for Leeds was that they won’t be kicking me.” Perhaps Johnny Giles summed it up best when he is quoted as saying “When people talk about Leeds being dirty, they forget that was the culture back then. You had to look after yourself. There were so many players around who would now be suspended all season long. We just made sure nobody ever managed to bully us.”
Ironically one of Revie's most notable critics was Brian Clough, who initially gave some degree of praise to Leeds following the 1969–70 season, commenting that ‘they have made the season’. However, Clough's attitude soon changed as the competition between their clubs intensified and over the course of subsequent seasons he would use his newspaper columns to attack Revie and Leeds, particularly in August 1973 in which he branded the Leeds players "cheats" and called for the club to be relegated to the Second Division on disciplinary grounds. Though Clough would surprisingly succeed Revie as Leeds manager, the ill-fated tenure lasted only 44 days.
Present day.
After being relegated to the Championship on the 8th May 2004, and spending 16 years away from the Premiership, they finally won promotion back in the 2020/2021 season under the guidance of Marcelo Bielsa, a top rated Argentinian player and manager. It would probably be an exaggeration to say he is revered as much as Don Revie, but if that is something he would wish for, he’s certainly going about it the right way. Since their promotion back to the Premiership, the City has been adorned with street art commemorating their return and much of it paying tribute to Bielsa.
The cache.
The cache is located in a very busy commercial area extremelly close to the Elland Road Stadium. It goes without saying that on match days there will be a significant amount of muggle traffic so extreme care must be taken when locating and raplacing the cache.
To find the final bonus cache, geocachers will have to find all of the caches in the series, and collect the bonus numbers. Half of the caches will have ‘F =‘ in it, and the other half will have ‘C =‘ in it. (FC - Football Club) Good luck.