Leeds followers threat wives’ wrath by ditching £5k household vacation for play-off closing

Two diehard Leeds United fans have risked the wrath of their wives by ditching their £5,500 family holiday – to watch Sunday’s Championship play-off final.

Dean Fairbrother, 59, and Liam Cooper, 43, will leave behind the luxurious Tropic Garden Hotel in Ibiza for a flight to London in the early hours of Sunday morning. The pair – who travelled to the Spanish island today (Friday) – will board a plane at 12.50am and watch the 3pm kick-off in London before returning early on Monday.

But the devoted duo only told their other halves of their plan once they had begun booking their flights to see the promotion decider against Southampton, with a place in the Premier League at stake. Liam, who only managed to bag a ticket on Wednesday for the game, joked he was ‘not in his wife’s good books’ when she learned of his new itinerary.

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She had fumed at him: “We’ve paid all-inclusive and then you’re going to go and spend £8 on a pint in Wembley?” But Liam, who has followed the club since he was a schoolboy and grew up beside Elland Road, said: “The last time I went to Wembley was 16 years ago, so I said, ‘I’ve got to go.'”

He added: “She wasn’t impressed when she found out I’d booked the flights without a ticket. So I’m not in her good books, but she’s happy now I’ve got a ticket now.”

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Dean’s wife Bridget Fairbrother, 57, joked that he would be doing “weeks of ironing” as payback for disrupting their pricey holiday. But she admitted it would have been “painful” to see Dean watching the match on a TV screen in Ibiza when he could have gone to Wembley.

She said: “All I can say is he’s lucky that he’s got a very accommodating wife. I think they’re nuts. But fair dos to them. That’s Leeds fans for you… I couldn’t have made him watch it in a bar in Spain, knowing he could have gone to Wembley.

“That would have been far more painful for me than actually him leaving. I’ll be sat by a pool, having a cocktail and thinking to myself, ‘It’s not really going to affect me.’

“I’m sure they’ll have a brilliant time. But he’s going to do the ironing for a very long time, put it that way, when he comes back from the holiday.”

Sheepish Dean added: “My wife sort of realised irrespective of what she said, I was probably going to end up going. But it hasn’t gone down particularly well.”

The pals, who spent their youth travelling around Europe watching Leeds United, said they had booked the week-long holiday together in Ibiza in September. And while they knew it was possible this would clash with the play-off final, they had to arrange the holiday for the half-term break period to suit their families.

The pair, who have watched more than 45 games between them this season, had begun thinking about how to get to the game over the last few weeks. When they watched Leeds United beat Norwich City 4-0 at Elland Road, they started buying flight tickets for the Wembley decider as they headed back home.

Dean, a semi-retired financial advisor who now lives in Newton Abbot, Devon, said: “We booked [the holiday] nine months ago – around the start of the football season. At that point, we had that naïve hope that it would all be over by now.

“But it was a potential risk… We were pre-empting this for a few weeks leading up. We both went to the second leg of the play-off, and I booked the outbound flight from Ibiza to Gatwick on the minibus coming back – we got that for £15 each.

“With it being half term, a lot of people are going the other way – hence Gatwick in and Birmingham back. But it took an awful long time on the internet to find something that was viable.”

Liam was left sweating when he realised he was not entitled to a priority ticket for the final under the club’s loyalty programme. But luckily he managed to get a ticket on Wednesday when they went on general sale.

The food inspector said: “I’ve supported Leeds all my life, I probably went to my first game when I was nine. At Elland Road, you go to the top of the street, and there’s an estate, and I grew up there. So literally, if you got a good throw, you could hit the stadium. It’s about half a mile.”

The pair expected to fork out around £300 each for flights, train journeys and taxi rides to see the game on Sunday – along with £55 on match tickets. And they hoped this expenditure would allow them to watch Leeds United get promoted to the Premier League.

Dean added: “It’s quite a commitment… Normal people don’t understand why you do these sorts of things.”