When Manchester United Drew 70,000
Going back to 1920
When Manchester United Drew 70,000
It’s not unusual for Old Trafford to draw over 70,000 customers these days. After all, the capacity is just a bit over 74,000.
But it wasn’t always that way.
For years, the largest Manchester United crowd came a few days after Christmas in 1920.
Now, note that this wasn’t the biggest crowd at the “old” Old Trafford, the version before the switch to all-seater that came after the Taylor Report. The record crowd in those days was 76,962 for an FA Cup semifinal between Wolves and Grimsby Town on March 25, 1939.
But that’s not a United match, and so we’ll set it aside for now.
That crowd of over 70,000 took place when United hosted Aston Villa on December 27, 1920.
Now, this was the second time in half a week that the two sides played each other. United traveled to Villa on December 25, as we’ll see in a second.
Newspapers around Christmas aren’t easy to find. The best I could find in terms of a league table was this from December 19, 1920:
As you can see, both sides were in the top half of the table. That’s actually a pretty good reflection of how both sides did in 1919-20, which, of course, was the first full Football League season following the war. United had finished 12th place in 1919-20; Villa were 9th, a few spots ahead of them.
Interestingly, it seems that the Football League deliberately decided to schedule home-and-away games for December 25 and December 27 for all teams in Leagues 1, 2, and 3:
I’m not certain whether this was a common scheduling gimmick or not.
Common or not, United wound up with a lovely Christmas present in the first match:
As the somewhat smudgy article described, this was Villa’s first home loss for the 1920-21 season.
And that set up the tremendous post-Christmas crowd that awaited both teams on Monday the 27th:
I’m not entirely certain I understand precisely why the crowd was so large. This source lists the Old Trafford crowd at 70,000; other contemporary sources list the figure as high as 72,000.
No other Old Trafford match in 1920 came close. The home encounter with Manchester City on November 20, for example, “only” drew 63,000.
In the end, United wound up a disappointment in 1920-21, finishing 13th. Villa, meanwhile, also slid back one position, finishing a distant 10th.
But, whatever the reason, that December 27, 1920 match was the largest Old Trafford match for decades.