United finished the Scottish Premier Division 1997–98 season in 7th place with 37 points, in the final season before the revamped SPL. Despite finishing 3rd in the previous season, 7th would be the club's best finish for the next six years.

The domestic cup campaigns brought defeats by Celtic: a quarter-final defeat in the Tennent's Scottish Cup and a disappointing 3–0 defeat in the Coca-Cola Cup final. In the UEFA Cup, United exited in the 1st round to Trabzonspor.

United's season started in July, with a trip into the Pyrenees to play against CE Principat from Andorra in the UEFA Cup. United notched up an 8–0 lead in the first leg, with Robbie Winters and Gary McSwegan both scoring hat-tricks. The home leg was won 9–0, which left United just one goal short of Rangers' 18–0 aggregate score against Maltese team Valletta in 1983.

The league started in August with Kjell Olofsson giving United a 1–1 draw with St. Johnstone at McDiarmid Park, before Gary McSwegan scored his 3rd hat-trick in 4 games in a 4–2 win over Queen of the South at Dumfries in the League Cup. After the successes of Olofsson, Pedersen and Zetterlund during the season before, manager Tommy McLean returned to Scandinavia several times during the course of the season to add to the squad. Thomas Tengstedt and Göran Marklund were the first two to arrive, but neither player would make an impact on the first team.

The next round of the UEFA Cup saw United drawn against Turkish outfit Trabzonspor, with the away leg up first where United went down 1–0. United then drew 1–1 at home to Hibernian, before beating them after extra-time in the League Cup three days later. The next game in the League was against Rangers at Ibrox, where Marco Negri equalled Paul Sturrock's record of scoring five goals in one match, as Rangers won 5–1.

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