'Same shirt, same name, same attitude' - Why Wimbledon FC couldn't just move to Milton Keynes
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Updated 24/08/2021 at 11:01 GMT
Is it possible to move a football club from one city to another, yet keep it the same club? As Wimbledon's owners found out when they tried to move to Milton Keynes, place is the most important thing. A new book extract from Andi Thomas' Underground, Overground looks back at how the club's hierarhcy tried - and ultimately failed - to claim that the club would be unchanged by the relocation.
11 Aug 2001: Wimbledon fans protest at the proposed move to Milton Keynes during the Nationwide League Division One match against Birmingham City played at Selhurst Park, in London. Wimbledon won the match 3-1
Image credit: Getty Images
Throughout the 2001/02 season, as fans grew angrier and angrier at Wimbledon's proposed move to Milton Keynes, the club hierarchy decided to try and win over their agitated congregation. They produced a glossy 32-page booklet called A Unique Solution to a Unique Problem, and subtitled: Why Wimbledon Football Club has to move to Milton Keynes. Note the "has to". This was not the start of a conversation but the end of one.
This booklet claimed, among other things, that a new ground at Plough Lane was impossible, and that "history" suggests clubs cannot rise from non-league to the top echelons of football. Wimbledon had disproved the latter point through the '70s and '80s, and AFC Wimbledon have just recently disproved the former. But the most interesting part of the booklet comes when Wimbledon's hierarchy attempt to make their case that Wimbledon in Milton Keynes will be the "same club" as Wimbledon in Wimbledon. In doing so they address a fundamental problem, for with a few exceptions beloved by those who set pub quizzes, English football clubs are named for the places in which they are located. Anybody considering moving a club, then, is immediately faced with a problem: do they stick with the old name, and look peculiar, or change that as well, and gravely weaken their claim to be the same club.
Initially, Wimbledon's owners were insistent that they would remain the owners of a club called Wimbledon. "The club's move to Milton Keynes would NOT mean the establishment of a new club", they insisted, capital letters and all. And how would everybody be able to tell? Well:
If and when the Club moves to Milton Keynes the Club will: Still be called Wimbledon FC; Continue to play in its famous yellow and blue colours; Continue to have the same never say die attitude!"
Despite the optimistic exclamation mark, none of these claims proved to be true. But we can see the thread of the argument: just because the club will be somewhere else, doesn't mean it will be something else. Or, to put it another way, the component parts of a club that matter, that give that club its identity, are the external tangibles of shirt, name, badge, and so on, along with various behaviours: that "never say die" attitude. If it looks like Wimbledon, and if it walks and talks and plays like Wimbledon, why, it must be Wimbledon, whatever the map says. It amounts to a claim about the nature of a football club: its location is neither necessary nor sufficient.
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11 Aug 2001: Wimbledon fans protest at the proposed move to Milton Keynes during the Nationwide League Division One match against Birmingham City played at Selhurst Park, in London. Wimbledon won the match 3-1.
Image credit: Getty Images
Club names, shirt colours, crests: these things are important to football fans. Cardiff City fans protested vigorously when their majority shareholder Vincent Tan changed the club's kit from blue to red, simultaneously reconfiguring the badge to incorporate a red Welsh dragon. The club announced at the time that the changes were "designed to help the club to develop its brand and to allow it to expand its appeal to as wide an audience as possible, with a view to delivering local success via an international and diverse market." It was implemented in 2012, and by 2014 surveys of supporters showed 85% were in favour of changing the kit back. Protest marches were numbering the thousands, and plans for a boycott of season tickets were under way. In December 2014, Tan announced that "Protesting will not make me change my mind," and called on the fans to "think carefully and support the club so that we can get promoted to the Premier League." But come the New Year, apparently on the advice of his mother, he reversed his decision. Cardiff City went back to blue in January 2015 and have stayed in blue ever since.
Name changes are rarer, and the most notable recent example came in 2013, when Hull City dropped 'Association Football Club' from their name and registered as 'Hull City Tigers Ltd'. The club's owners, Assem Allam, told the Guardian that he planned to go further and drop "City" as well, claiming that the word was redundant and too heavily associated with other clubs. Hull would become 'Hull Tigers', as "the shorter the name the more powerful — think of Coca-Cola, Twitter, Apple". He also claimed that if he were in charge of Manchester City he would "change the name to Manchester Hunter." Fans protested, and the protests sharpened when Allam, in response to the formation of a fan group called 'City Till I Die', told the Independent "They can die as soon as they want, as long as they leave the club for the majority who just want to watch good football." Eventually his application for a formal name change was rejected by the FA, and the plan appears to have been abandoned.
Had Wimbledon's owners decided to solve their business conundrum with an aggressive rebrand — purple and yellow hoops, Vinnie Jones' face on the badge, a name change to the Transpontine Wombles — we can assume that Wimbledon's fans would have mobilised in similar fashion to the protestors in Cardiff and Hull. It is not clear whether the idea of a new club would have taken hold in the same fashion, however. That will doubtless come down, in large part, to the fact that it is easier to imagine a new club in a place that is being vacated: Vincent Tan, as far as I can tell, never considered taking his club off to pastures new. Let the protest fit the crime: you complain about a new kit by wearing an old one; you complain about a lost club by starting a new one.
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11 Aug 2001: Wimbledon fans protest at the proposed move to Milton Keynes during the Nationwide League Division One match against Birmingham City played at Selhurst Park, in London. Wimbledon won the match 3-1.
Image credit: Getty Images
For the club's owners, the dire financial position explained the practical need for the move, but the contention that the club would remain the same provided a justification for the otherwise unthinkable. By this understanding, the club consisted in these traditional, transplantable, cosmetic components — shirt, crest, name — and in the intangibles that had surrounded the club, the relocated craziness of the Crazy Gang. The club would still be the club; therefore, the club should move to protect the club. For the protesting fans, meanwhile, the whole question of the club's identity was almost entirely contingent on place: name, badge and suchlike all followed as a matter of course and historical observance, while sporting, financial and administrative inconveniences could all be borne. One fan I spoke to, who started watching Wimbledon in the Selhurst Park days, put it like this:
There was a famous statement by Koppel, who said "So-called fans would rather see us playing back at Plough Lane in the Fourth Division than playing in Milton Keynes in the Premier League. Those people aren't true fans." And you say: you couldn't have that more wrong if you tried. 'Cos you know, as any football fan will tell you, the exact opposite is clearly the case. If you would rather support your football team, and its sense of belonging, and its place, and community and all the rest of it, at whatever level, then yeah, you are a true fan. If you need to be in the Premier League to give a toss, you're not."
Indeed, looking at the Wimbledon story, we might conclude that location is the only thing about a football club that cannot possibly be allowed to change. It is the ultimate is, the ultimate should. If a football team is given its identity by the repeated and interested attendance of its fans, over time, then it is secured in that identity if and only if those fans can continue to attend the same place.
That is, I think, not just a question of practicality and access. Football grounds are not just the stage for the experience, but an intimate part of the experience; they are not just places to watch but places that shape the experience of watching. Many football fans develop a topophilic relationship with their club's ground that cannot be explained by the aesthetic appeal or utility of that ground: as was said of Wimbledon's original Plough Lane, 'a dump, but our dump'. Such attachment suggests something stronger, more productive, more enriching than mere attendance. Something like home-making. While I was poking this chapter into shape, I came across an essay by Josie Sparrow on William Morris' Red House, which clarifies beautifully this sense of creative mutuality between people and place.
We dwell in our doing, and our doing makes the places that we dwell. Our inhabiting creates what is habitual; likewise, our habits unfold within and around the places we inhabit. Everything is situated, everything is relational, everything is in process — and so there can be no absolute beginnings, only points of departure. These points are accretions of moments, of memories; they are places that shelter and nourish. They are sites of folding-in that make unfolding possible."
And then: "We might call them homes."
Practically speaking, the Wimbledon split centred on the immediate interests of the two parties: the desire to run a profitable business set against the desire to watch a local football team. But it became a contest between two competing ideas of what a football club should be, how it should behave, what should and should not be the case. It is perhaps up for debate how far the owners were actually committed to this idea of what a football club should be, and whether they were in fact much more exercised by the need to say whatever might rescue their rapidly curdling investment. But even if this is the case, it is still telling that they felt they had to have this argument: that they had to meet their opponents and make their case on this terrain. Even for those who would treat a football club as only a business, lip service must be paid to idea that it is something more.
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