An identity crisis is not something that you associate with AFC Wimbledon.

The Dons show what can be achieved when the forces of self-interest try to separate a club’s cash from the people who put it into the coffers. They stood up to those running the game and created a club imbued with the soul that typified their greatest teams. In a season where a Football League club has ceased to be, Wimbledon’s plight should interest not just their fans, but all football. 

It is a situation that might be familiar to an Irish audience, but less so to Britons. Every GAA club around the country relies on collective altruism to get things done. But it is almost unique in British football. Wimbledon are fan-owned and supporter-operated; from stewards and car park operators to those working behind the bar.

They are a throwback of the best kind, with players joining members for a drink afterwards and talking through the club’s fortunes. Their current stadium - Kingsmeadow, shared with Kingstonian - has been a popular destination for loanees, with Bournemouth’s Aaron Ramsdale arriving just last season. 

But it is not their home, and never will be.

A decision on their return to a £30m stadium at their spiritual home of Plough Lane, and its capacity of 9,000, had left the club’s ethos potentially endangered. With a shortfall of £11m, stadium plans were under threat and the club in search of somebody to fill the gap. The club’s members have been amicably-polarised over the type of club they may become. Would they scale back plans to fit their budget? Or would they accept investment from the outside?

Choosing outside investment was anathema to many. With scars fresh from burned fingers, supporters wondered whether a club can ever trust investors that want ultimate control of a club. Memories of Norwegian owners buying out Wimbledon FC majority shareholder Sam Hammam in 1997 are too vivid, even 23 years on. Buyers’ PR-manipulated words in the press are one thing, their actions quite another.

The situation was summed up by AFC Wimbledon Chief Executive Joe Palmer, whose programme notes before the win against Doncaster in December laid bare the situation:

“For many, remaining a fans’-owned club is sacrosanct. If that means we only have the funding to play non-League football, then so be it.

“For others, outside investment might take Wimbledon further up the leagues. A fan-owned club can’t possibly afford that, they'd argue. Restructuring our club so new investors bring in new money is a price worth paying – even if that means losing some control.”

Are the two strands outlined by Palmer mutually-exclusive? Can we expect more support from wider football for ventures like Wimbledon, when clubs like Bury leave towns without both a club and a place of community? Do the roots of Wimbledon’s history - the muck and the bullets - mean that more fans are happy to exist, in whichever league that may be?

Off The Ball look at the remarkable change in fortunes since the end of last year and speak to former Wimbledon player Kenny Cunningham about his hopes for the club’s future. 

But to understand where they are now, we must look at how AFC was born.

A phoenix rises

AFC Wimbledon were founded in 2002, after the FA allowed Wimbledon FC to move to the 'new town' of Milton Keyes; creating the first franchise club in British football. An independent commission, headed by the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer with input from football administrators, ultimately sanctioned the move to Buckinghamshire. The decision tore apart the fabric of the club.

Former majority shareholder, Lebanese businessman Sam Hammam, had sold 80% of his shares in the club to Norwegian businessman Bjørn Rune Gjelsten and Kjell Inge Røkke - the pair becoming joint owners of the club in 2000. Røkke, as it happens, was subsequently convicted for corruption in 2005.

The pair appointed Charles Koppel as chairman and began investigating the opportunity to move the club to Milton Keynes; a move led by retail businessman, and soon-to-be MK Dons chairman, Pete Winkelman. Winkelman had identified the ‘new town’ as the perfect place for a football club, in part to drive people through his retail empire.

The fans were in uproar. Banners emerged at matches with Koppel’s image, emblazoned with "Wanted: For the premeditated murder of Wimbledon FC.” Fan meetings were hurriedly-assembled as the momentum towards the move grew among the board and the football authorities. Supporters turned their backs on games, as they felt the board had shunned them.

Neil Shipperley, club captain in 2002, said after the boycott said that the move would have to happen if the situation were to continue on the same track. Shipperley’s words encapsulated what a lot of the players felt at the time:  "We can't win. We're employed by Wimbledon and we want them to survive."

While Milton Keynes’ council greeted the relocation with the deathly-hollow assertion that the town was “becoming a city of sport”, the Dons Trust said that the club’s move marked “the death of our club”. In any other case, the Trust’s assertion may have sounded melodramatic, but not to fans from south-west London, or football’s wider hinterland. In a final middle finger to the upstarts, the commission said that the creation of a club in the ilk of AFC would “not be in the wider interests of football.”

Nine years on, as men, women and children broke down with joy as AFC Wimbledon defeated Luton to reach the Football League, banners adorned with those immortal words waved in the Manchester wind. This was a reciprocated middle finger to football administration and the owners of the now-dead club. Wimbledon had been reborn in an organic, bottom-up way, with the gritty determination of the club that gave us the Crazy Gang. 

And, as the chant famously goes: “It only took nine years.”

Those nine years created a blueprint. While other ‘phoenix’ clubs have come to pass, only AFC Wimbledon stands as a totem of a club dislocated root-and-branch from their home city. The ground-sharing with Kingstonian began with the club itself, and Kingstonian deserve great credit for being so accommodating for so long. 

After intense lobbying, Wimbledon finally agreed on a return to their home borough of Merton in 2015 and purchased the site of the old Wimbledon Greyhound stadium. The new site is just a few hundred yards from their original home, where the club resided from 1912 to 1991 - and they broke ground on the site last year. But rising planning, groundwork and steel costs led to an £11m shortfall in funding; one that needed to be filled by the end of February 2020 if the project was to remain viable.

This led to a special general meeting of the Dons Trust on 9 December, where fans were proposed several options:

• “Hang on and hope” by continuing to obtain loans 
• “Bare-bones stadium” in producing a scaled-back Plough Lane
• Further crowdfunding and donations from fans and the community
• External investment to fund some, but not all, of the £11m outlay

An innate phobia from many felt that they would rather scale back their ambitions in the short to medium-term to avoid external funding. The wounds are still too fresh. The overwhelming message from Trust members was that “the club must pursue other avenues of funding before seeking external investment.” 

The pursued option 3: get money from fans and the community.

New hope

Even the club’s hierarchy has been staggered by the money they were able to raise through the so-called ‘Plough Lane Bond’. The scheme sees contributors lend their money to the club to raise initial capital for the stadium, and make a return of between 1-4% on their cash, over 5-20 year terms. At the time of writing, they have raised £5.3m of their £11m target. 

They are not there yet; with the plan to have the stadium ready for next season, every second and penny counts. The deadline has since been extended until the end of the season, with a target of £7.5m The club are organising a traditional lender to make up any gap, but the more put in by fans, the less they have to rely on outsiders.

If any club was going to overturn insurmountable odds, it had to be AFC Wimbledon. Dons fans claim to own the two most beguiling narratives in football history: the rise from non-league to beating a dominant Liverpool side to the FA Cup in ‘88 and the staggering rise from non-existence to Football League status in less than a decade. 

In a landscape that has seen Bury cease to exist and other clubs coming perilously-close, supporters within Wimbledon and without may find this latest crowd-funding narrative the most important.

This is a club owned, run and funded by fans. To an Irish audience, this is not unfamiliar with the ethos and spirit of the GAA. In harnessing the expertise available to them from their own - those with planning, drafting and lobbying experience, for example - they have come close to securing their future.

Wimbledon are sanguine about taking things slowly, building within their community and keeping players umbilically-linked with the supporters that helped facilitate their success.

They have seemingly developed a design for communal success.

It would be the most hard-hearted of fans that would begrudge it to them.

In part two of our report, we speak to former Wimbledon player Kenny Cunningham about his experience during the Milton Keynes saga and his hopes for AFC Wimbledon in securing their future.

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