1974 FA Charity Shield: Keegan & Bremner Sent Off

Last Updated: August 2026

Published: 10 August 2026

The 1974 FA Charity Shield: Two Red Cards and a Changing of the Guard at Wembley

Liverpool won the 1974 FA Charity Shield, beating Leeds United 6-5 on penalties at Wembley on 10 August 1974 after the match finished 1-1. But the day is remembered for the chaos: Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner were sent off for a stand-up fight and threw down their shirts as they walked off, the first British players ever dismissed at Wembley. It was also Bill Shankly’s final match as Liverpool manager and Brian Clough’s first in charge of Leeds.

Both men walked into an 11-match ban apiece, and one neutral curtain-raiser between the League champions and the FA Cup holders carried two red cards, a penalty shoot-out and a managerial changing of the guard. Here is how one afternoon came to hold all of that.

The Day the Season Started With a Fight

A Curtain-Raiser Nobody Expected to Boil Over

The Charity Shield in 1974 was meant to be a gentle way back into the football calendar. The FA had just moved it to Wembley for the first time, dressing it up as an exhibition between the champions and the Cup holders, and 67,000 turned up on 10 August to watch Leeds United and Liverpool ease into the new season. Neither club was the home side; Wembley was neutral ground, Leeds carrying the League title they had won under Don Revie the previous spring, Liverpool the FA Cup they had lifted against Newcastle. Bob Matthewson had the whistle. On paper it was a handshake before the real business began.

The football itself did what a season opener usually does. Phil Boersma nudged Liverpool ahead on 19 minutes, and Leeds took until the 70th to draw level through Trevor Cherry. With the game finishing 1-1 in normal time, it went to penalties, and here Wembley got its one piece of pure sporting theatre: it stayed level all the way to the goalkeepers, until Leeds keeper David Harvey saw his effort saved and Ian Callaghan tucked his away to settle it 6-5 for Liverpool. A shoot-out reaching 6-5 is the sort of detail the anorak files away and everyone else forgets, mostly because of what had happened half an hour before it.

How the afternoon unfolded:

1. 19 minutes: Phil Boersma puts Liverpool 1-0 up.
2. Just after the hour: Kevin Keegan and Billy Bremner are sent off for fighting and leave the pitch.
3. 70 minutes: Trevor Cherry equalises for Leeds to make it 1-1.
4. Penalty shoot-out: Liverpool win 6-5, Ian Callaghan scoring the decider after David Harvey’s miss.

Keegan, Bremner and the Shirts on the Turf

Soon after the hour, it went off. Kevin Keegan, the Liverpool forward, and Billy Bremner, the Leeds captain, ended up trading punches in the middle of the pitch (a proper stand-up fight, not a bit of shirt-pulling), and Matthewson sent them both off. That alone would have made the afternoon notable. What turned it into folklore was the walk to the tunnel. Both men peeled their shirts off, over the head, and flung them down onto the turf as they went, a gesture of contempt that flashbulbs caught and newspapers ran for days. It is the image that has outlived the scoreline, the result and very nearly the competition itself.

For Keegan it capped a fortnight he would rather have skipped. He had been sent off in a pre-season friendly at Kaiserslautern just four days earlier, so Wembley made it two red cards inside a week. The pair also earned a small footnote in the stadium’s history: they were the first British players ever to see red at Wembley. According to the Football Association’s disciplinary records, no home footballer had been dismissed there before. Rattín had walked at Wembley in 1966, but he was Argentine, exactly the kind of qualifier this audience reaches for first. The FA, watching its brand-new curtain-raiser descend into a brawl on live pictures, was not in a forgiving mood.

Shankly Out, Clough In: The Managerial Hinge

The disciplinary hearing that followed handed both men an 11-match ban and a £500 fine each, penalties well beyond the norm of the day and explicitly framed as punishment for bringing the game into disrepute. The suspensions ran deep into September, which meant two of English football’s most recognisable players opened the season by watching it. Even by the standards of a fixture that was supposed to be an exhibition, it was a heavy price for one lost temper apiece.

The reason the day sits so heavily in the history books, though, is the two men in the dugouts. Bill Shankly led Liverpool out at Wembley for the last time. He had stunned the club by announcing his retirement in July, and this was his farewell on the touchline before Bob Paisley took over officially on 13 August, three days later. In the opposite dugout stood Brian Clough, taking charge of Leeds United for the very first time. He had inherited Revie’s champions, a dressing room that did not want him, and a job he would hold for all of 44 days before being sacked on 12 September. So the last afternoon of one era and the first of a doomed one landed on the same Wembley pitch on 10 August, framed by a stand-up fight and two shirts left on the grass.

The 1974 FA Charity Shield

One neutral afternoon at Wembley closed the Shankly era at Liverpool, opened Brian Clough’s doomed 44 days at Leeds, and produced the first British sendings-off the stadium had seen, all wrapped around two players throwing their shirts to the turf. For more moments like this one, from the game’s biggest rivalries to its strangest disasters, keep exploring our On This Day series and the channel.