Who is the ,,real" FC Wimbledon?

FA Cup in England, first round, on November 3, 2024, and it couldn’t have started better: MK Dons against AFC Wimbledon, that is, Wimbledon versus Wimbledon in a direct duel. Behind this is one of the quirkiest stories in English football.

When I met Kris Stewart in Vienna in 2007, the somewhat corpulent Englishman had long been a star in the international football fan scene.

Because he was willing to fight for his club and take new paths. I wrote his story in my 2010 book Absolute Dynamite! Football Stories from Britain.

On a Monday morning…

On May 28, 2002, two days before the start of the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. People and machines are in a good mood. London financial advisor Kris Stewart lost his job that morning – only to have a new role by the end of the day that would make him famous throughout Europe. In the evening, the good Kris Stewart learned that his favorite club, FC Wimbledon, would be moving to the completely football-irrelevant small town of Milton Keynes.

An independent commission of the English Football Association (FA) – after three weeks of negotiations and a vigil by Stewart's supporters at the FA headquarters on London’s Soho Square – approved the move to Milton Keynes, a satellite town located 90 kilometers northwest of the British capital. Stewart had to wash down this frustration at the Fox & Grapes pub, 9 Camp Rd, London SW19 4UN, a meeting place for die-hard “Dons” fans.

FC Wimbledon: “Us against the rest of the world”

FC Wimbledon – The 1988 FA Cup winner (1-0 against the great FC Liverpool) with its stars Dave Beasant, Vinnie “The Axe” Jones, John Fashanu, and Lawrie Sanchez, was labeled by the media as “The Crazy Gang” because no team played such rough jokes or embraced the “us against the rest of the world” mindset so well.

The consequences of the Taylor Report, the comprehensive investigation of all English stadiums after the Hillsborough disaster (1989), marked a turning point for Wimbledon in 1991. The club moved to Selhurst Park, home of Crystal Palace in south London, as renovating the stadium at Plough Lane would have been too costly. Club chairman Sam Hammam meanwhile considered relocation plans to Brixton and Tolworth and even hinted at renaming the club as early as 1992.

Death by installments

In 1994, Plough Lane was demolished. It had to make way for a 15 million euro shopping center with luxury apartments. For Kris Stewart, it was sacrilege: “If you move more than a few miles from your familiar place, you destroy everything that makes football. After all, this sport is part of English culture.”

The new owners from Norway, Bjorn Rune Gjelsten and Kjell-Inge Rokke, presented the next relocation plans in 2000: After the “Dons” were relegated from the Premier League, a new stadium was to be built with a capacity of 25,000 in Basingstoke, Hampshire. They even floated the idea of merging with the Queens Park Rangers. “FC Wimbledon,” Kris Stewart later told me, “had finally become not a club but a business model.” The South African Charles Koppel, who had since been appointed president, saw Milton Keynes, a satellite town with no footballing significance, as “the only option for relocation.”

Thus came “the death of the club,” as Marc Jones, spokesperson for the Wimbledon Independent Supporters Association (WISA), put it.

“Initially a crazy idea”

And so the death of FC Wimbledon was toasted with beer and schnapps at the Fox & Grapes. As the evening wore on, the ideas became stronger. People became enraged, angrily demanded the villains be ostracized, drew concepts with beer-wet fingers on the counter, and eventually founded a new club. When Kris Stewart left the Fox & Grapes, heavily tilted – he still doesn’t want to pin down the exact time – he had, to his own surprise, a new job. He was president of AFC Wimbledon, which was registered as a club on May 30, 2002. “At first, I thought founding the club was a crazy idea,” Stewart told ZEIT, “but the idea of strengthening fan rights through the club’s foundation developed very slowly. Something like that would never have been possible in England in the Eighties.”

Since then, and since the final dissolution of the old FC Wimbledon after insolvency in 2004, AFC Wimbledon and the Milton Keynes Dons have existed.

MK Dons: Football and Kafkaesque conditions

Author Colin Irwin felt he was “in a Kafkaesque dreamscape” when he visited the club in League One in Milton Keynes in 2006. A herd of plastic cows was set up behind the stadium, and the scene appeared bizarre. “A totally indifferent town,” wrote Irwin, “and in the stadium, an atmosphere like a picnic on the lawn in front of the big, new IKEA, which Milton Keynes had not long since acquired.” All pretty wooden.

“The general football life experience,” Irwin lectured, “teaches us that the Milton Keynes experiment is doomed to fail. Football is not Field of Dreams, that movie with Kevin Costner, and ‘if you build it,’ then people won’t just not come; they won’t care one bit. A city won’t simply embrace a foreign football club in its heart.” Somehow, no.

How did it go on? The MK Dons started in 2004 in the Football League One (3rd English league) instead of the “old” FC Wimbledon and managed to reach the Championship in 2015/2016, but only for one season.

Since 2023, they have been languishing in Football League Two, where the AFC Wimbledon, founded by Stewart and his colleagues, now also plays.

The “Dons” are far from dead

AFC Wimbledon moved into its new stadium, the Cherry Red Records Stadium in the Merton district of southwest London, near the old Plough Lane, on November 3, 2020.

In 2018/2019, long after Kris Stewart stepped down as club president, the “Dons” stood a league above the MK Dons – in Football League One. They held this until 2022.

The question of who the “real” FC Wimbledon is was settled on November 3, 2024, in the 17th duel between these two very different clubs. For the fifth time, AFC Wimbledon triumphed over “The New Dons” – 2-0, marking their third consecutive win across competitions for the “Dons.” „The extra of this game,“ explained "Dons" coach Jonnie Jackson afterward, "is that there's always a bit of fuss around it." The Don is dead, that’s the title of the famous 1973 mafia film starring Anthony Quinn († 2001). But the "Dons" are alive and kicking.