There’s a bar on Calle Juan de Austria in Corralejo, Fuerteventura that holds maybe 25 people. On Leeds United matchdays, they’ve squeezed in 65. The fire marshal would probably have a heart attack. The fans don’t care.
The York bar has become the unofficial home of the Leeds United Supporters’ Club Fuerteventura branch, run by John Holliday. He’s a former Elland Road season-ticket holder who traded rainy Yorkshire for the Canary Islands 15 years ago. What started as a few expats looking for a place to watch games has turned into something that feels a lot like the real thing, just with better weather and worse beer temperatures.
Holliday told the Yorkshire Evening Post the atmosphere got genuinely wild when Leeds beat Manchester United. That’s the kind of win that sticks with you, especially when you’re watching it at 1am in a packed bar that’s technically too small for the crowd inside.
The mix is interesting. You’ve got locals who’ve adopted Leeds as their team, holidaymakers who wandered in wearing a different shirt and got converted, and diehards who plan their vacations around the fixture list. At one point, five fans in the bar all held North East Upper season tickets at the same time. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a community.
The Summer Schedule Gets Complicated
Leeds is heading to the US for preseason, which throws the whole operation a curveball. Fuerteventura shares UK time, so American kickoffs mean late nights. Wrexham and Sunderland start at 12:30am UK time. That’s brutal for a Tuesday. Liverpool’s Chicago game kicks off at 8pm on August 2, which is manageable. But the US timings could be prohibitive for some of the older fans.
Leeds is expected to host RB Leipzig at Elland Road the weekend of August 8-9, then play Manchester United in Dublin. The York will show every friendly it can. Holliday isn’t going to let a little thing like a transatlantic time zone difference stop him from packing 50 people into a 25-seat bar.
The Fuerteventura branch draws about a dozen locals regularly, plus whoever happens to be passing through. Newcastle is also well-represented in town, but Leeds fans have carved out their own turf. It’s not Elland Road. It’s not supposed to be. But for a lot of supporters who moved away or just got lucky with vacation timing, it’s the next best thing.
And honestly? Watching a 3-2 thriller at 2am in a bar that smells like sunblock and spilled beer sounds like its own kind of perfect.
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