Elland Road

The land at the foot of Beeston Hill, beside the road to Elland, belonged to Bentley's Brewery and was called the Old Peacock Ground after the pub that faced it — the origin of the Peacocks nickname later carried by both Leeds City and Leeds United. Its first occupants were the rugby league club Holbeck, home there from 1897, who moved from Holbeck Recreation Ground after buying the ground from Bentley's for £1,100. The first competitive football match played on it was a neutral-venue West Yorkshire Cup final on 23 April 1898, won 1–0 by Hunslet against Harrogate, and Holbeck put up a new stand in readiness for the 1898–99 rugby season. The association football club Leeds Woodville of the Leeds League shared the ground with Holbeck for the 1902–03 season. Holbeck went under in 1904 after losing a play-off against St Helens, and the ground was put on the market.

A meeting at the Griffin Hotel in Boar Lane that August formed a new club, Leeds City, which agreed to rent Elland Road for the coming season; the lease was signed on 13 October 1904 at £75 a year, with an option to buy for £5,000 in March 1905 that was cut to £4,500 in November. After City's first season in the Football League the club built a 5,000-seat covered stand on the west side for £1,050. Crowds were rising — over 22,500 crammed in for a local derby with Bradford City on 30 December, bringing in £487 of gate receipts — and the directors employed a ground committee to oversee further development. In February 1906 it bought 3,961 square yards on the Churwell and Gelderd Road side from the Monk's Bridge Iron Company for £420, and built a 4,000-seat grandstand that the Lord Mayor, Joseph Hepworth, unveiled before a match against Chelsea on 17 November. The £3,000 project used over half a mile of steel and included a training track running the length of the stand, dressing and officials' rooms and a motor garage, and the pitch was drained to stop it waterlogging.

Financial hardship then put the club's future in doubt, and after much uncertainty an offer of £1,000 with an annual rental of £250 was accepted for the ground. Through the Great War Elland Road was used as a venue for drill and shooting practice, until the 1919–20 season began. City started that season brightly, but a scandal over illegal payments to players during the war years saw the club expelled from the Football League after only eight games. Some local businessmen contemplated digging up the clay deposits under the pitch and turning the ground into a brickyard; Yorkshire Amateurs took the tenancy and played there for a brief spell, saving it from development. Across fifteen seasons at Elland Road, from 1905–06 to its expulsion, Leeds City drew 1,944,365 spectators, an average of 10,234. In 1920 Yorkshire Amateurs sold the ground to the newly formed Leeds United for £250.

In the 1920s the South Stand terrace was covered with a wooden barrel-shaped roof and became known as the Scratching Shed, and another stand went up on the east terracing, the Lowfields. The terrace behind the north goal was called the Spion Kop, after the hill in South Africa where 322 British soldiers died at the Battle of Spion Kop in January 1900 during the Boer War. No significant changes were made in the 1930s or 1940s, though the crowds could be large: 56,796 came for the visit of the eventual champions Arsenal on 27 December 1932, a record that stood for almost thirty-five years, while the last game of that season drew 9,006 against Middlesbrough. The ground was chosen for the all-Leeds Rugby Football League Championship Final between Leeds and Hunslet in 1938, when 54,112 saw Hunslet take the title. In the Second World War the War Office requisitioned Elland Road for administrative purposes.

Floodlights were used for the first time on 9 November 1953 against Hibernian, the £7,000 installation claimed to be the most expensive in the country at the time; 31,500 spectators saw two goals each from John Charles and the manager Raich Carter as Leeds beat the Scottish side 4–1, the first of several Monday night games against clubs from north of the border, with Dundee and Falkirk visiting in the following weeks. In the early hours of Tuesday 18 September 1956 a fire gutted the West Stand and scorched large sections of the pitch, consuming the offices, kit, club records, physiotherapy equipment, dressing rooms, directors' rooms, press box and the generators for the floodlights. The roof collapsed into the seating area before the fire brigade arrived, damage was estimated at £100,000, and the club's insurance cover was inadequate. Players helped clear the rubble and wreckage, but the 2,500-seat stand could not be salvaged. The directors launched a public appeal, assisted by Leeds City Council, which raised £60,000 towards a £180,000 West Stand opened at the start of the following season, its 4,000 seats mounted behind a paddock that held 6,000 standing spectators. The club needed the funds to pay for it, and John Charles was sold. Two years later a second fire broke out after a Central League match against Preston North End, but the club secretary Cyril Williamson and several directors were on hand to put it out before it did significant damage.

Don Revie's arrival as manager in the 1960s brought promotion to the First Division and ten seasons finishing in the top four. Elland Road's first televised game, a league fixture against Everton on 20 March 1965, ended in a 4–1 Leeds win, and a new attendance record of 57,892 was set on 15 March 1967 in an FA Cup fifth-round replay against Sunderland. In April 1968 the Spion Kop terracing was stripped away for a £250,000 roofed stand, built in less than six weeks and known as the Gelderd End; it left around 60 feet of turfed ground behind the goal, and the pitch was moved 30 feet north. In 1970 a £200,000 corner stand coupled the West Stand to the Kop, and an almost identical one at the same cost linked the Lowfields to the Kop. The Leeds United Sports and Souvenir Shop, with its programme collection, opened in 1972. The floodlights were replaced in 1974 by the tallest in Europe, 260 feet high, three of the pylons erected at first and the fourth four years later. In that same year, in which Leeds won the league for the second time, the Scratching Shed was dismantled and replaced by a £500,000 South Stand holding a 4,000-capacity standing paddock, a row of sixteen executive boxes and a 3,500-seat tier above them, though plans to link it to the Lowfields were curtailed when the club ran out of money.

In the summer of 1982 Leeds sold Elland Road to Leeds City Council for £2.5 million and took a 125-year lease in return, and the homeless Hunslet rugby league club moved in. Ambitious designs drawn up in 1987 by Newcastle upon Tyne architects, promoted by the developers Baltic Consortium and W. H. White and costed at between £50 million and £75 million, would have rebuilt the Lowfields as a 7,500-seat all-seater stand with a 2,000-seat sports stadium alongside it, together with a shopping centre, ice rink, cinema and leisure centre. None of the designs were acted on. In September 1991 the South-East corner opened, joining the South and Lowfields stands to give away supporters a full corner stand; its yellow seats earned it the nickname the cheese wedge, and its 1,710 places served as the family stand until the membership outgrew them. A banqueting suite and conference centre at the rear of the West Stand opened in April 1992.

The biggest renovation to date began in the summer of 1992, when the Lowfields was demolished and replaced by a two-tier East Stand of around 17,000 seats with no restricted views, completed at a cost of £5.5 million and containing 25 executive boxes, 10,000 seats in the lower tier and a further 7,000 above. On completion it was the biggest cantilever stand in the world. Its opening coincided with the completion of the South Leeds Stadium and Hunslet's departure for their own ground. For the 1994–95 season Elland Road became an all-seater as the Taylor Report directed, with nearly 7,000 seats replacing the Kop terracing; the rebuilt end was officially opened that October by the club's president, George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, and Elsie Revie, widow of Don Revie, and renamed the Don Revie Stand. In December 1997 an £11.3 million scheme for the West and South Stands, which would have raised capacity to around 45,000 and put a 15,000-seat indoor arena behind the West Stand for basketball, ice hockey and concerts, was shelved after an ice hockey team, the Leeds Lasers, had already been named to play in it; earlier plans for a 65,000-seat "Wembley of the North" had also failed to materialise. The club regained ownership in 1998, when its new owners, the Leeds Sporting Company, agreed to pay Leeds City Council £10 million to buy the stadium back. A statue of the club captain Billy Bremner was erected outside the ground in 1999.

Rugby league has been played at Elland Road throughout its history — at least 385 matches — and the first Challenge Cup tie there was a home match for Holbeck on 18 March 1899. The 1938 Championship Final between Leeds and Hunslet, played there as a neutral venue on 30 April, set the ground's rugby league attendance record of 54,112, and the 1982 Challenge Cup final replay between Widnes and Hull FC on 19 May was the first match televised live from the stadium. Hunslet, who had used the ground for midweek BBC2 Floodlit Trophy fixtures because their Parkside home had no floodlights, shared it full time from 1983 until 1995, when they left for the South Leeds Stadium; they returned in 1997 for a fourth-round tie against Bradford Bulls, brought to Elland Road for its higher capacity. Ten Challenge Cup semi-finals have been played there, along with the Yorkshire Cup finals between 1988 and 1993. Of sixteen rugby league internationals staged at the ground, the deciding third Test of the 1994 Ashes series between Great Britain and Australia drew 39,468 on 20 November 1994, a record for an international in the code there, and 39,337 watched the deciding match of the Super League Test series between the same two countries on 16 November 1997. Australia beat Great Britain 44–4 in the 2004 Tri-Nations Final before a capacity crowd; in the 2005 final 26,534 saw New Zealand beat Australia 24–0, Australia's first series or tournament defeat since France beat them 2–0 at the end of the 1978 Kangaroo tour. Australia won the Four Nations finals held there in 2009, by 46–16, and on 19 November 2011, by 30–8. A semi-final of the 2021 Rugby League World Cup was played at the ground, which was also selected in 2021 for the 2022 Challenge Cup triple header of men's semi-finals and the women's final, and named in November 2023 as the venue for the 2024 Magic Weekend.

As a neutral venue for football, Elland Road has hosted nine FA Cup semi-finals, the first between Barnsley and Everton on 26 March 1910 and the last between Everton and Tottenham Hotspur on 9 April 1995; among those in between were Arsenal against Hull City in 1930, Charlton Athletic against Newcastle United in 1947 and West Ham United against Everton in 1980. The 1993 Sheffield derby semi-final was originally set for the ground but switched to Wembley after both clubs and their supporters protested that it was too small for the fixture, with the risk of crowd trouble and a perception that Arsenal and Tottenham would gain an unfair advantage from playing their own semi-final in London. England drew 3–3 with Sweden at Elland Road on 8 June 1995, the first England home international played away from Wembley in twenty-two years and the first time since 1946 that a new ground had staged one, and met Italy in a friendly on 27 March 2002 while the new Wembley was being built. Chosen as one of the eight Euro 96 venues, the ground staged three Group B matches, all of them involving Spain: 1–1 draws with Bulgaria on 9 June and France on 15 June 1996, and a 2–1 win over Romania on 18 June. England's women beat the Netherlands 5–1 there in their final preparation match before winning Euro 2022 as the host nation. Alex Ferguson called Elland Road "the most intimidating venue in Europe".

Twice the ground took in a West Yorkshire neighbour burnt out of its own. Huddersfield Town played the last two games of the 1949–50 season at Elland Road after a fire struck Leeds Road on 3 April 1950, returning the next season once the main stand had been rebuilt, and Bradford City used it for three matches after the fire that consumed a stand at Valley Parade during a match against Lincoln City on 11 May 1985. Two months after the Bradford fire, the England and West Germany teams from the 1966 World Cup final met again at Elland Road, England winning 6–4 and the match raising £46,000 for the Fire Disaster Fund. The ground also took the non-league club Farsley Celtic's first-round FA Cup tie in 1974, when 10,337 saw Third Division Tranmere Rovers win 2–0, and the replayed 1990 FA Vase final, won 1–0 by Yeading against Bridlington Town. Three rugby union matches have been played there, the first on 10 November 1992 when South Africa beat the North of England before 14,000, and two more in the 2015 World Cup. The Leeds Cougars of the British American Football League moved over from Bramley in May 1986 and had to relocate the following year when the stadium needed improvement, and in 1987 the Yorkshire County Board of the Gaelic Athletic Association staged a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Mayo at the ground. In 1987, 15,000 Jehovah's Witnesses held a three-day convention at Elland Road; the annual conventions continued there until 2013, when they moved to the new First Direct Arena.

On 16 August 2001 the chairman Peter Ridsdale wrote to season ticket holders and shareholders setting out two options — improve Elland Road or relocate — with a ballot form enclosed, though the letter was biased in favour of relocation. Of the 18,500 who voted, 87.6 per cent backed the move and fewer than 13 per cent voted to stay. On 7 September 2001 Ridsdale announced his intention to move the club to a 50,000-seat stadium at Skelton in time for the 2004–05 season. The modern attendance record at Elland Road was set that same season, 40,287 for a Premiership match against Newcastle United on 22 December 2001. The Skelton plans never came to fruition; Ridsdale resigned in March 2003, leaving financial disarray, and the PLC followed in March 2004. Later in 2004 the stadium was sold with a 25-year lease and a buy-back clause to raise funds for an instalment of a loan from Jack Petchey, and on 27 December 2006 it emerged that it had been sold fifteen months earlier to the British Virgin Islands-based Teak Trading Corporation. After John Charles died on 21 February 2004 the fans demanded a tribute, and the West Stand was renamed the John Charles Stand.

The South Stand was refurbished in the summer of 2006 and closed for the first games of the 2006–07 season, gaining modernised corporate facilities and a restaurant, Billy's Bar, named after the former captain Billy Bremner. Successive development schemes came and went: hotels, a shopping centre and a health club were floated in the programme for the Huddersfield Town match on 8 December 2007, and a 350-room hotel, arcade and megastore behind the East Stand were announced on 27 October 2008, and on 6 November 2008 the city council announced it would not build the proposed Leeds Arena on its land next to the ground. Leeds was named on 16 December 2009 among the host cities for England's bid to stage the 2018 World Cup, which would have meant rebuilding the John Charles and Don Revie stands to take capacity past 50,000, but England did not host the tournament. On 28 December 2009 the chairman Ken Bates spoke of adding 2,000 to 3,000 seats to the South Stand by removing its executive boxes; the work never started, and Bates sold the club in 2012. A statue of Don Revie was raised outside the ground that year, marking forty years since the club won the FA Cup. The arcade, hotel and megastore intended for the later stages of a five-phase East Stand scheme did not follow either, the club passing to GFH Capital and then to Massimo Cellino; only the phase begun in March 2011 was built, extending the upper concourse and adding 25 executive boxes while cutting around 2,500 seats and leaving the ground just under 38,000.

In June 2017 the new owner Andrea Radrizzani bought the stadium back from Jacob Adler's Teak Commercial Limited for £20 million through his own company, Greenfield Investment Pte Ltd; the first match after the club took back control was a pre-season friendly against Oxford United on 29 July 2017, won 2–0. Josh Warrington beat the IBF world champion Lee Selby at the ground on 19 May 2018 on a split decision, in his first world title fight. The South Stand was named after Norman Hunter on 23 April 2020, three days after his death, and in January 2021 the club announced that the adjoining Centenary Pavilion would be turned into a large vaccination centre as part of the national COVID-19 vaccination programme. In July 2024 Leeds United announced that it had taken full ownership of Elland Road in March 2024, twenty years after selling it. Leeds City Council approved the sale of land around the stadium on 21 April 2025, allowing an expansion of nearly 20,000 seats that would make Elland Road England's seventh-biggest football stadium, and in September 2025 the club appointed BDP Architects to deliver a capacity of around 53,000, with upper decks added to the John Charles and Don Revie stands, expanded premium seating in the John Charles Stand, targeted work on the Norman Hunter Stand and road improvements around the ground. Planning permission was granted by Leeds City Council in January 2026, and renovations on the West Stand began in June 2026, expected to be completed in 2030. The club owns and operates the ground, which is listed as an asset of community value after an application by the Leeds United Supporters' Trust was approved by Leeds City Council.