Why I’m Rooting for AFC Wimbledon to Go Up
Soccer Sheet editor Sam Spencer talks about phoenix club AFC Wimbledon's rise to the Football League in England, and talks soccer with a Member of Parliament.
Editor’s Note: An earlier draft of this piece appeared in the Wombles Downunder newsletter. If you’d like to learn more about becoming an owner of AFC Wimbledon, feel free to reply to this email!
Growing success in the 80s and 90s. A greedy owner who moved the team at the turn of the millennium. Fights over stadiums and a permanent home. A fight over the team’s historic legacy. Eventually, the club that moved gives up the name, and the new team - with the right name - is back home where it all started, with the legacy intact.
No, I’m not talking about AFC Wimbledon. I’m talking about the Charlotte Hornets, my hometown basketball team in the NBA.
While Charlotte, North Carolina and South London are different places, we both know what it's like to lose a team tied to our very identity - and that's one of the many reasons I started following Wimbledon, also known as the Dons and the Wombles.
The name of our Hornets comes from our city being called a "Hornets Nest of Rebellion" by Cornwallis during the American Revolution.
The Hornets were a big deal in the 80s and 90s. They were Charlotte's first top-flight professional team in any sport. They gained international recognition for their unique teal and purple color scheme.
However, the owner was deeply unpopular. In the late 90s, schemes to move the team became public knowledge. In 2002, the team finally moved to New Orleans (which might as well be Oslo - it's about the same distance from Charlotte as Norway is from London).
When Charlotte was awarded a new top-flight basketball team, they were called the Bobcats. It wasn’t a name with much meaning to Charlotte, but instead was speculated to be in reference to the new owner, BET Media Group founder Robert Johnson.
A decade later, when New Orleans announced their name would be changed to the Pelicans, a local supporters movement in Charlotte petitioned that the league restore the "Hornets" moniker as part of a campaign called "Bring Back the Buzz." The Bobcats' new owner Michael Jordan agreed, and the league made an unprecedented move that also restored all of the records and statistics of the previous Charlotte Hornets to the new Charlotte Hornets.
There are of course many differences between the two stories, but as a lifelong football fan and Hornets fan, Wimbledon's story spoke to me. The community and history are brilliant. Every Dons supporter I've met has been helpful and kind.
The Dons also have many things we don't on this side of the pond - democratic ownership first and foremost among them.
The Phoenix Club
In the United Kingdom, professional sports teams rarely move. When BASEketball satirized pro team relocations in 1998, the concept was almost uniquely American: European clubs with deep local roots simply don’t get up and move.
However, near the end of the 20th century, discontent was brewing in south London.
Wimbledon F.C. was founded in 1889, and for most of its history was an amateur club. In the 1980s, after being elected to the Football League for the first time in 1977, the club experienced a renaissance and rose to the top tier of the English Football League by 1986.
Two years later, Wimbledon’s “Crazy Gang” won the Football Association Cup with a 0-1 win over Liverpool at Wembley, widely regarded as the club’s high water mark.
While the club would spend the 1990s in the First Division/Premier League, rumors of a sale and move began to surround Wimbledon. First it was Dublin, then it was Oslo. Then, the new owners sold Wimbledon’s home of Plough Lane for a supermarket redevelopment after many years of a ground-share agreement with Crystal Palace.
When the club was relegated to the second tier in 2000, the sale became inevitable. In August of 2001, the club’s ownership announced their intent to move to Milton Keynes due to financial reasons, and after a series of deliberations and appeals, the FA appointed a three-person commission that approved the move to Milton Keynes on May 28, 2022.
The commission issued a report, which in addition to justifying the move famously denounced the idea of a new Wimbledon phoenix club. The majority wrote, “resurrecting the club from its ashes as, say, 'Wimbledon Town'” was “not in the wider interests of football.”
The Wider Interests
The commission report did nothing to stymie the plan that was already in motion. With the knowledge that very few supporters would follow the team north to Milton Keynes, many Wimbledon fans had started putting their own club together. On May 30, 2002 - just two days after the FA commission’s decision - AFC Wimbledon was born.
They call it "the final betrayal". It came on May 28, when an FA commission agreed to Wimbledon's move to Milton Keynes. A large number of Wimbledon fans found themselves contemplating a life shorn of the one thing that had remained constant, refusing to acknowledge the new entity being created by the chairman Charles Koppel. Something, to be sure, would have to be done.
The result is AFC Wimbledon, committed to returning football to the Wimbledon area for good. Yesterday, officially, they were born - only six weeks after the decision was made to create them. A capacity crowd of just under 5,000 at Sutton's Gander Green Lane stadium welcomed their first match.
To make sure the new club would never pack up and leave, AFC Wimbledon is fan-owned by the Dons Trust, the ownership group that controls over 75% of the shares in the club. The board of the Trust is democratically elected with one vote per member, and a plurality of the board of directors for the club are chosen by the Trust.
Anyone in the world can join the Trust and become an owner for yearly dues of as little as £15 ($19); most memberships cost £30 ($38), while a life membership is available for £750 ($939).
Much like how most German clubs adhere to the 50+1 rule - essentially, a club’s membership (fans) must own a majority of the shares in any Bundesliga team - AFC Wimbledon currently requires 75% or more of the club to be owned by the Dons Trust. Parts of the other 25% are owned by outside investors, including American author John Green, best known for young adult books that have been adapted into Hollywood films (The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns).
The Path to Promotion
The new club would have to start near the bottom of the English Football Pyramid, while the relocated organization - now named Milton Keynes Dons - got to start in the third tier, where Wimbledon F.C. would have continued.
Last year, I spoke with Dame Siobhain McDonagh, who serves as Minister of Parliament for Mitcham and Morden in Greater London, about what AFC Wimbledon means to her south London community. She is also a Wimbledon supporter and Dons Trust member.
“Well, it's a classic tale of David and Goliath,” said McDonagh. “The little man against the big man … and this romantic tale got loads of soccer supporters to sign up. If they weren't your first team they might well be your second team, because they're not about big money. They're not about rich people. They're about the club being open, owned by the fans.”
AFC Wimbledon quickly moved from the ninth tier to the third tier, with six promotions in 13 season. In 2011, the club was promoted to EFL League Two, the new club’s first time in the football league.
The highest level of soccer AFC Wimbledon reached since being reborn 23 years ago is League One, the third tier of English football pyramid below the Premier League and the Championship. On May 30, 2016 the club won the League Two playoff final at Wembley to earn promotion to League One.
As AFC Wimbledon was promoted to League One, Milton Keynes - derisively called the Franchise by Wimbledon supporters - was relegated to the same league from their high water mark, a year in the second-tier Championship.
Though 2016 saw the teams in the same league for the first time, the MK Franchise and AFC Wimbledon first met in 2012 in the FA Cup, and AFCW would earn their first win in their third meeting, in 2014. MK currently leads the series with a total of 8 wins and 22 goals to AFCW’s 5 wins and 19 goals; the teams have drawn five times.
However, as is the nature of football, the AFCW was only able to stay up in League One through the end of the 2021-22 season, when the team was relegated back to League Two where they currently play.
MK would be relegated the next year. Since then, AFCW leads MK 3-1-1 in head-to-head matches.
Do You Know the Way to Plough Lane?
For most of AFC Wimbledon’s existence, the team played at Kingsmeadow, a small football stadium in London with a capacity of 4,850 (despite only having 2,265 seats). Once the men’s First Team was promoted back into the Football League, they needed a solution to enable the organization to continue to grow.
Like many fan-owned clubs across the world, the AFCW issued shares to finance construction of a stadium, allowing the Dons to return to their ancestral home of Plough Lane - though with a debt obligation from the fan-held shares. At a construction cost of £34 million ($42.8 million), the new Plough Lane holds 9,215.
AFC Wimbledon completed their move back to Plough Lane - called Cherry Red Records Stadium for sponsorship purposes - in 2020, with the occasion commemorated by a long list of sponsors near Plough Lane’s in-house pub, appropriately named “The Phoenix.”
The Promotion Push
After the men’s first team was relegated in 2022, Johnnie Jackson took over as manager and has built the squad back up to a place where they are able to win promotion. As of this writing, AFC Wimbledon is second in League Two. If the team finishes the season in the top three, they are automatically promoted to League One, while if they finish in places 4-7, the team will compete in a playoff for the final promotion spot.
Milton Keynes is currently 16th in League Two; if that result holds, it will be the lowest-ever finish for the club. Additionally, if Wimbledon wins promotion, it will be the only the second time the Wombles will play in a higher league than MK.
However, if promoted the men of AFCW won’t be the only Dons on the third tier of English football - the AFC Wimbledon women won promotion to the third tier last year. They also play in the same league as the MK women, who are currently in last place with no wins, facing almost certain relegation.
If it wasn’t clear, a large part of AFC Wimbledon culture is schadenfreude when it comes to the failures and foibles of Milton Keynes. The rivalry - don’t call it a derby, and don’t call MK the Dons - is made even stronger by the perception among Wimbledon fans that MK represents everything wrong with football, while Wimbledon has a purer version of the beautiful game.
“In Britain, our national game is soccer,” said McDonagh. ”For Wimbledon, it remains at its core what soccer should be. It's about a fan-owned club, about standing up for your team, doing your best and doing things properly. And you know, people say you can't win that way, but we've proved you can.”
Losing a team is painful, but the community AFC Wimbledon has built in its place is a testament to what a couple thousand fans who love football can accomplish without a billionaire owner or a payroll buttressed by a sovereign wealth fund. It’s one of just a couple clubs that make me take off my reporter hat and put on a kit and a scarf, or put up 30 quid a year so I can be an owner of a soccer team.
With luck, they’ll be a League One team this time next year. Come On You Dons!
If you’d like to learn more about becoming an owner of AFC Wimbledon, feel free to reply to this email!
Great piece and connection to Charlotte, a new AFC Wimbledon fan has been born.