How do you replace a football club? How AFC Wimbledon were born after Wimbledon FC left to become MK Dons

The relocation of franchises is one of those grim realities of US sporting existence. You might not like it, but unless you live in a handful of the biggest markets in the country, teams will come and in due course teams will go. For most of the history of the English Football League, such a prospect would have been utter anathema. Not only that, it seems unimaginable that someone might attempt to test the norms, to snatch up a team from one part of the country and drop them elsewhere.

That is almost entirely down to the experiences of AFC Wimbledon, the phoenix club whose very existence stands as a redoubt in defence of fan power in the English game. On Saturday morning, live on Paramount+, they meet Milton Keynes Dons, the team that once represented this pocket of south west London. Wimbledon do so not only as a side who sit three points ahead of their most hated rival in the League Two table. They do so as a model of the club their predecessor should have been in its final years.

Why Wimbledon FC left for Milton Keynes

Let’s try and sum up one of the most contentious stories in English football.

In the 1970s and 1980s Wimbledon FC rose rapidly through the English football pyramid, their incredible story culminating in 1988 when the Crazy Gang beat the Culture Club in the FA Cup Final. In the saturated market of London football, this was never going to be a club to draw crowds like Arsenal or West Ham and when the Taylor Report, issued in the wake of the infamous Hillsborough disaster, in which unsafe stadium conditions allowed for the death of 95 Liverpool fans, concluded that their Plough Lane home was not up to standards, Wimbledon found themselves thrust into a ground sharing agreement with Crystal Palace that lasted longer than either side might have wished.

The chairman at the time, Sam Hammam, failed to find a site for their new home in south west London and a Premiership club with no fixed abode looked a rather appealing prospect. A proposed move to Dublin never materialized but in Buckinghamshire a new retail park needed a tenant for the stadium that was key to getting the development approved. Milton Keynes, founded in 1967, needed a football team. Wimbledon’s new Nowegian owners were more receptive than any other club approached. In May 2002 the Football Association appointed an independent commission to rule on whether Wimbledon could move nearly 60 miles north. By a margin of two to one, the move was approved.

The impact of losing a team

“The team was basically stolen from football fans,” says Nigel Reo-Coker, the Wimbledon captain who a few weeks into the 2003-04 season had to pack his bags and head to the National Hockey Stadium (ground had not yet been broken on the promised 30,000 seater the team were due to move into). “It might be normal in America. For football, it’s not. This team is the heartbeat of the community.”

Indeed Wimbledon in particular spoke of London as a whole. The player most readily identified with the heyday of the Crazy Gang, Vinnie Jones, was such an archetypal Cockney hardman that he has made a film career out of it. Dave Beasant, Dennis Wise and Wally Downes all hailed from within the M25. In the brutally competitive battle for the capital’s best and brightest young talents, Wimbledon held its own. Jason Euell, Chris Perry and Carl Cort were among those who came through the ranks before being sold for sizeable returns.

“It was a club that was representative of London,” says Reo-Coker. “We had boys from north, south, east, west London. The crazy thing is all these different boys brought London together at Wimbledon. The club was ahead of its time, bringing players from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Sweden, Finland.”

When the time came to head up the M1, it was those from the “boarding school” of the Wimbledon academy that were tasked with the impossible task of winning hearts, minds and matches. It was not what these youngsters had signed up for, as Reo-Coker notes.

“We were part of the history of the club too. You’re part of the club, you idolize the older players, dreaming that one day you might make it to play with them. You’re part of a group, a family. You’re emotionally bought into it.

“We had been sold a dream. We knew we were losing the identity of the club. We knew what Wimbledon represented and what staying — maybe at the old dog track — would have meant. As players you’re powerless. You’re still chasing the dream of being a footballer, you might not still feel as loyal, but you have to be professional. It’s not just us being affected, we’re leaving our friends and family and the fans who’d become like that.

“If we were finding it hard as players, how were the fans finding it?”

How do you replace a football club?

Long before Reo-Coker and his team mates were schlepping to Milton Keynes, those fans had come up with a plan. Indeed there were only two days between what their supporters would consider the death knell of Wimbledon FC — the independent commission’s vote — and their rebirth as AFC Wimbledon. “Sometimes people think there was a plan all along,” says Kris Stewart, the club’s founding chairman. “I promise you there wasn’t. There was a vague idea all along. When someone said ‘what happens if we lose [the commission vote]?’ The answer is very obvious. We go again.”

On May 28 Stewart, Ivor Heller, Marc Jones and Trevor Williams led a meeting at The Fox and Grapes pub on Wimbledon Common — “it was the first meeting I’ve been to where someone was genuinely hanging from the rafters” — and while the anger was far from dissipated it became apparent that there was no realistic means of recourse. Wimbledon FC were gone, Stewart knew. “What I needed was something a bit more positive. We hadn’t seen any football that season, of course there had been games but I couldn’t tell you what happened. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to do something that meant the football mattered.”

So began the process of imagining up a club from scratch. It really was an act of creativity, best guesses at how much was needed to run a football club and how much they might get. Stewart estimated they would need around £15,000 to fund AFC Wimbledon’s first campaign. A season ticket at £200 ought to cover that. They ended up with around £80,000. Stewart reflects: “I remember a letter that came to me ‘here’s a season ticket deposit for my dad. He went to his first game at Plough Lane in 1937. He never did Selhurst and he wants to come next season.’ Stuff like that sticks, makes it a little dusty in there.”

They’d need players too. Open trials brought 230 players down to Wimbledon Common. Their new manager, Terry Eames, was convinced it was a wind up. On July 10, six weeks after what seemed to be the end of football in SW19, AFC Wimbledon played their first friendly match. Sutton United from the next town along seemed an appropriate opponent. Not quite. Twice kick off was delayed, there were simply too many supporters turning up. 

Wimbledon would go far and go fast, reaching the Football League a year earlier than their ludicrously overambitious timeline of 10 years. In due course they would come all the way back, the impossible dream of football at Plough Lane, a 9,000 seater home in the heart of Wimbledon. That it truly is. Outside every supermarket in the town, representatives of the Dons Trust collect supplies for the local food bank. The stadium itself serves as a community space. Even in a town filled with Arsenal and Chelsea fans, almost everyone is a Wimbledon fan to some degree. That is a triumph. Still, it was that 4-0 loss at Gander Green Lane that stands out for Stewart as the highlight of a 22-year journey.

“I remember coming out of the Etihad Stadium [after the playoff win over Luton Town that secured promotion to the EFL] and a number of people said to me ‘I bet it’s all worth it now,” he says. “It comes from a really nice place, but it was worth it on day one. When there were 4,500 people at a pre-season friendly that meant it was worth it because it meant there was a football club for the people of Wimbledon.

“Then I remember queueing up to pick up a ticket at Kingsmeadow [Wimbledon’s home before they moved to Plough Lane in 2020] and dimly becoming aware of a dad and his lad behind me. I can’t remember exactly what he said but the dad was saying that I’d had a role in founding this club. In and of itself that’s moving, but this kid was probably not alive when it happened. It hit me. We made a thing and it’s for him. One of the fantastic things about Wimbledon, everything we’ve done belongs to you. You, five year old child in a Wimbledon shirt, won the cup in 1988. It’s yours.”

Why Wimbledon’s story resonates around the world

A modest club reestablishing itself at the heart of its neighborhood might seem like a local story, but its story of a community refusing to let football be taken from them rings far beyond London. It rings all the way to the west coast of the US, in fact. In the summer of 2022 LA Galaxy decided that it would quite like Irvine’s Championship Soccer Stadium to host its second team. The problem? That ground already had a tenant, USL’s Orange County Soccer Club.

Here was the Wimbledon story in reverse, a franchise intent on dislocating a local team to suit its needs. For the club’s president of business operations Dan Rutstein — who counts himself alongside The Fault in Our Stars author John Green among the few to part own both Orange County SC and AFC Wimbledon — there was a little personal needle in this.

“When the Galaxy thing happened to us it was a watershed moment,” says Rutstein. “You don’t realise what you’ve got until someone tries to take it away from you. After what happened to Wimbledon, they perhaps ended up with more engaged fans. There was an element of that with Orange County. Hundreds of fans turned up at council meetings, people were in tears telling council members why this club meant so much to them.

“Some external force was trying to take away our club. That meant a huge amount to me personally and as we were constructing our plan of action there were definitely shades of Wimbledon for me. It’s not the same story but it evokes the same feelings and principles. As a fan, I’d been part of the Wimbledon journey from afar. I wanted to tap into that. This was my chance to do for this club what some heroic people had done for Wimbledon.”

This time, victory was unqualified. Orange County SC signed a 10 year lease with the City of Irvine. A week later, taking inspiration from Wimbledon, they offered fans the chance to buy their own stake in their club. They are not the only team to see inspiration in south west London.

The team that left: MK Dons

The same could not be said of MK Dons. The consortium that took the team to Buckinghamshire had believed they were picking up and relocating a team who would be in or around the Premier League for the next decade as they had been for the past decade. Instead, their first season at the National Hockey Stadium — still playing as Wimbledon FC — ended in relegation from the Championship. They have only been back there in one year since.

“It felt brand new,” says Reo-Coker of his brief time in Milton Keynes before he moved to West Ham. “It’s like learning to walk again. No one knew what the experience was going to be like, what to expect. I don’t think the facilities were up to standard. There was a vision for the future but for where we were at the time it should have been a lot better prepared and done. 

“The facilities weren’t there. I can understand it takes time to build certain things but if you knew this was on the horizon for so long, a lot more should have been in place to accommodate a football club. That’s why they got relegated.”

More than two decades later, the disdain for the franchise club, rated the second most hated team in English football by FourFourTwo in 2017, is no less widespread. The success of an academy that has produced the likes of Dele Alli and Kevin Danso barely registers. When they arrive in London on Saturday morning they can expect a welcome of vitriol on a level with the most longstanding rivalries with England. As recently as May a Wimbledon player was handed a one game ban for kicking balls at the MK Dons travelling contingent. The time it will take for hostilities to ease is best measured in generations.

How to watch Wimbledon vs. MK Dons

• Date: Saturday, September 14 | Time: 7:30 a.m. ET
• Location: Cherry Red Records Stadium — London
• Live stream: Paramount+
• Odds: Wimbledon +138; Draw +230; MK Dons +200

No wonder. When MK Dons turn up, Wimbledon fans see the future that was robbed from them. Reo-Coker believes they would have done much more with their early 2000s situation if they had stayed put. “If it never happened, I think Wimbledon would be a club within the Premier League orbit, a bit up and down but around there,” he says. 

“Perhaps they’d have been like Brentford. I’ve met people there who are creative, forward-looking, humble and work hard at the training ground. That would have been Wimbledon. They would have continued to produce talent upon talent upon talent and selling them to all these different clubs. They might be fighting against relegation but they would have been that team that no one wants to play against.”

“Tell us what else we can’t do and we’ll have a go”

Now many Wimbledon fans would acknowledge the limits of their ambitions, at least for now, might have to be the odd season in the Championship. The economics of football make all the more difficult that glorious journey to cup final day at Wembley, the biggest and best team in the land felled by a team barely a decade out of non-league. However, those who have been along for the AFC Wimbledon revival never betray the sense of mourning what might have been.

“What was done to us was absolutely awful and you couldn’t possibly wish that on anyone,” says Stewart. “It should never have happened and it mustn’t ever be allowed to happen again but actually, are we in a better place? Who knows. Without the Premiership, without the top flight cash, without the stadium and losing our roots all the time, my guess is that we probably have drifted and, absent someone coming along and chucking huge wads of cash, and actually fallen apart.

“What we’ve got now is better in every sense, except our position in the pyramid. For now. That’s in our hands.”

Stewart notes that his fellow founder Williams puts it best. “They said we couldn’t restart the club, they said we couldn’t get back in the League, they said we couldn’t get back to Plough Lane, so tell us what else we can’t do and we’ll have a go.”