Relocation Of Wimbledon F.C. To Milton Keynes
Wimbledon F.C. spent most of its history in non-League football before being elected to the Football League in 1977. A series of club owners believed that its long-term potential was limited by its home ground at Plough Lane, which never changed significantly from the team's non-League days. Meanwhile, the Milton Keynes Development Corporation envisaged a stadium in the town hosting top-flight football and was keen on the idea of an established League team relocating there. The Wimbledon chairman Ron Noades briefly explored moving Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in 1979, but decided it would not lead to larger crowds. Charlton Athletic briefly mooted a relocation in 1973, and in the 1980s the Milton Keynes Development Corporation offered a new ground to Luton Town.
Wimbledon rose through the professional divisions unusually rapidly in what has been called a "fairytale". By 1986, they had reached the First Division, the top-flight of English football. In 1991, after the Taylor Report ordered the redevelopment of English football grounds, the team entered a groundshare at Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park stadium, about 6 miles (9.7 km) east of Plough Lane. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while the Wimbledon chairman Sam Hammam sought a new stadium site in south-west London, but this search proved frustratingly long, both for Hammam and the club's fans. Much to the anger of most Wimbledon supporters, Hammam proposed new locations for the team outside London, including the Irish capital Dublin. He sold the club to two Norwegian businessmen, Kjell Inge Røkke and Bjørn Rune Gjelsten, in 1997 and the following year sold Plough Lane for a supermarket redevelopment.
Starting in 1997 a consortium led by Pete Winkelman proposed a large retail development in Milton Keynes including a Football League-standard stadium, and offered this site to Luton, Wimbledon, Barnet, Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers. Røkke and Gjelsten appointed a new chairman, Charles Koppel, who announced on 2 August 2001 that Wimbledon intended to relocate to Milton Keynes. Koppel said the club would otherwise go out of business. After the League refused permission, Koppel launched an appeal, leading to an FA arbitration hearing and subsequently the appointment of a three-man independent commission by the FA in May 2002 to make a final and binding verdict. The League and FA stated opposition but the commissioners ruled in favour, two to one. The vast majority of the team's fans switched allegiance to AFC Wimbledon in protest. Wimbledon F.C.'s relocation was delayed for over a year by the lack of an interim ground in Milton Keynes meeting Football League standards. In June 2003 the club went into administration; Winkelman's consortium injected funds to keep it operating and paid for the renovation of the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes, where the team played its first match in September 2003. Winkelman's Inter MK Group bought the relocated club in 2004 and concurrently changed its name, badge and colours. The team's new ground, Stadium MK, opened three years later. MK Dons initially claimed Wimbledon F.C.'s heritage and history, but officially renounced this in 2007. AFC Wimbledon received planning permission for a new ground on Plough Lane in 2015, which they eventually moved into ahead of the 2020–21 season.
Background
Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes, in northern Buckinghamshire, was established by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government as a new town on 23 January 1967. Named after the village of Milton Keynes already present on the site, it was formed primarily as a London overspill settlement following the recommendations of governmental studies in 1964 and 1965 to build "a new city" in Buckinghamshire incorporating existing towns such as Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Wolverton. This site was chosen as it was equidistant from London and Birmingham, close to main roads and railways, and near Luton Airport. About 40,000 people lived on the Milton Keynes site before 1967; the government set a target population of 250,000.
When Milton Keynes was founded, no football club within its boundaries was professional and none played in the Football League. The teams most advanced in the English football league system or "pyramid" were the United Counties League sides Bletchley Town and Wolverton Town & B.R., and Stony Stratford Town of the South Midlands League; New Bradwell St Peter and Newport Pagnell Wanderers (Newport Pagnell Town from 1972) would join the South Midlands League in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Nevertheless, the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, created by the government to oversee the town's planning and construction, envisaged a stadium in Milton Keynes capable of accommodating a top-flight football team.
Accession to the Football League; club relocation in English football
In English football, the relocation of teams away from their traditional districts is unusual because of the nature of the relationship between clubs and their fans: the local football club is regarded by most English football supporters as part of the local identity and social fabric rather than as a business that can be transplanted by its owners at will. As a result, any relocation plan would be strongly opposed by fans in the club's original area, and unlikely to succeed in most new locations due to the existence of established teams in most towns and cities that would already have secured the loyalty of local football fans. John Bale, summarising a study published in 1974, writes that, in the view of most fans, "Chelsea would simply not be Chelsea" were that club to move a few miles within the same borough to Wormwood Scrubs.
The geographic redistribution of the 92 Football League teams was considered a possible eventuality by some around that time, including Sir Norman Chester, who headed an investigation into the condition of English football in 1968. Before the 1986–87 season, clubs could not be relegated out of the League's Fourth Division. The bottom four clubs had to apply for re-election by the other member clubs at the end of each season, alongside any non-League teams who wished to take their place, but the replacement of an established League side in this way was quite rare. From the inaugural post-war season (1946–47) through to 1985–86, clubs already in the League were supplanted on only six occasions. "New communities have developed ... which lack clubs in League membership," Chester reported, in 1968. "Amalgamations of old clubs would provide vacancies for new clubs to enter the League". Merging football clubs in England has been described as "anathema" to the fans. Moore concluded "Merged clubs lose fans as well as gain them. If formed way back, “Bristol United" would probably have fared better than either [Bristolian clubs] City or Rovers have done independently, but there is too much history and animosity to merge now.". "Alternatively", Chester also added, "the movement of established clubs to new communities could provide a way both of saving old clubs and at the same time bringing League football to new and growing areas." Closely fitting this description, Milton Keynes provided a clear staging ground for such an experiment.
At the end of the 1978–79 season, 20 leading non-League clubs left the Southern League and the Northern Premier League to form the Alliance Premier League. This national non-League division started in the 1979–80 season; it was called the Football Conference from 1986 to 2015, when it became the National League. Since the 1986–87 season, the champions of this league have received promotion to the Football League, with the League's bottom club being relegated in exchange. This was expanded to the Conference champions and the winners of a promotion play-off before the 2002–03 season, with the worst two Football League clubs being relegated. The situation of the Football League "closed shop", which for nearly a century effectively barred most non-League clubs from accession, therefore no longer exists. Any club in the English football pyramid (which also includes some clubs from Wales) can potentially win enough promotions to reach the Football League or the Premier League, the separate top division formed in 1992.
Precursors in Scottish and English football
According to the Football League's statement to the independent commission on Wimbledon F.C. in May 2002, the English League "had allowed temporary relocations for good reasons outside 'conurbations' in respect of certain clubs where it was intended the club would return, but there has been no previous occasion on which the Football League had granted permission to a club to relocate permanently to a ground outside its 'conurbation'." Clubs in the English professional ranks that have relocated to other locales within their traditional conurbations include Manchester United and Woolwich Arsenal, who moved 5 miles (8 km) and 10 miles (16 km) respectively in 1910 and 1913. South Shields of the Third Division North relocated 8 miles (13 km) west to Gateshead in 1930 and renamed themselves Gateshead A.F.C. The commission reported that there was no Football League precedent for a move between conurbations, but stressed that there was direct precedent for such a move in Scotland.
Promotion and relegation in and out of the Scottish Professional Football League was not introduced until the league system's reorganisation in 2014; until then it was nearly impossible for sides outside the League to join. Scottish League membership therefore remained largely restricted to well-established cities as opposed to new towns. Two Scottish League teams left their metropolitan districts for new towns during the 1990s. Third-flight club Clyde moved from Shawfield Stadium (close to Rutherglen in the south-east of Glasgow) to the new town of Cumbernauld, about 16 miles (26 km) to the north-east, in 1994, and a year later Meadowbank Thistle, a struggling Edinburgh club in the fourth tier, relocated amid fans' protests about 20 miles (32 km) west to another new town, Livingston. Clyde kept their original name, while Meadowbank renamed themselves Livingston Football Club.
In English non-League football, events surrounding Enfield F.C. have been latterly described as mirroring what was to occur at Wimbledon. Enfield's owner Tony Lazarou sold the club's ground at Southbury Road in 1999 and arranged several short-term groundshares before resettling Enfield 10 miles (16 km) west in Borehamwood—temporarily, he said, while he looked for a new stadium in Enfield. Two years later, after no site had been identified and a dispute had developed regarding an escrow account, the Enfield Supporters' Trust resolved in June 2001 that Lazarou lacked sufficient will to bring the club back to Enfield and so founded a new team, Enfield Town, which based itself locally and won the support of much of the original Enfield fanbase. In a similar case in 2012, the supporters' trust affiliated to Northwich Victoria broke away to form 1874 Northwich. In each of these cases, Stephen Mumford comments in his 2013 work Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion, "supporters have agonised over where their allegiance properly lies".
Early Milton Keynes relocation proposals
Charlton Athletic (1973)
The south-east London club Charlton Athletic were linked with a move to "a progressive Midlands borough" in 1973, a year after Charlton's relegation to the third tier. The Gliksten family, which owned Charlton from 1932 to 1982 and had a history of proposing elaborate schemes for the club, revealed plans to build a community sports complex at The Valley, and to hold a public market at the ground on weekdays. Greenwich Council refused to license the market and insisted that the complex be built on public space at a local park. The club reacted by announcing the proposed relocation to the Midlands. Fans inundated the local media and club offices with strong opinion against a move, prompting Charlton to print a statement in 14 April 1973 matchday programme telling fans that the proposed relocation was because of the council's attitude regarding the market and complex plans, which the team said threatened its future. "You, the supporters, can make sure the club continues in Charlton by protesting as loud as you can to Greenwich Council over their refusal to grant us permission for our plans," the message explained. No permanent relocation occurred, but the capacity of the Valley was slashed repeatedly in the following years: to 20,000 in 1975 and to 13,000 in 1981.
Charlton were made homeless in September 1985 when they began groundsharing with Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park. Maguire claims that Greenwich Council and some factions of the club wished to see Charlton move 2+1⁄2 miles away from the Valley to the Blackwall Peninsula, though this was unpopular as that area is "closer to Millwall territory" while also concluding "this would arguably have hampered the club's future growth". After supporters fielded candidates in the 1990 local elections as the Valley Party, getting a 10.9% share (14,838 votes) a return was approved on 2 April 1991. In August 1991 they moved in with West Ham United at the Boleyn Ground, better known by its eponym district Upton Park. Finally, on 5 December 1992, Charlton had their first match back at the Valley, a 1–0 win over Portsmouth.
Wimbledon (1979)
The south-west London club Wimbledon, traditionally a semi-professional non-League side, won three successive Southern League championships between 1975 and 1977 and were thereupon elected into the Football League. Nicknamed "the Dons", they proceeded to perform strongly in fully professional football, winning promotion to the then-top flight First Division for the 1986–87 season. The club's swift "fairytale" rise from obscurity through the English football pyramid caused it to reach a level of prominence far above that suggested by its modest home stadium at Plough Lane, which remained largely unchanged from the club's non-League days. Wimbledon's record attendance at Plough Lane—18,000, set "in the 1930s against a team of sailors from HMS Victory"—was never broken during 14 League seasons at the ground, including five in the top flight.
Ron Noades, who purchased the club for £2,782 in 1976, came to see Plough Lane as a potential limitation by 1979. He surmised that it could only attract a relatively small number of fans because of its location, close to large areas of sparsely populated parkland. Noades's interest was piqued by the site the Milton Keynes Development Corporation had earmarked for a stadium next to the town's still-under-construction Central railway station. "They were very keen to get a Football League club, effectively a franchise if you like, into Milton Keynes to take up that site," Noades said in a 2001 interview. Planning to relocate Wimbledon there by amalgamating with an established Milton Keynes club, Noades purchased debt-ridden Southern League club Milton Keynes City (MK City; formerly Bletchley Town) for £1. He and three other Wimbledon directors—Jimmy Rose, Bernie Coleman and Sam Hammam—were promptly voted onto MK City's board "in an advisory capacity". This was a separate personal investment by the four directors, Noades said at the time, and not relevant to a relocation, though he also spoke at length about what he saw as the superior long-term promise of the Milton Keynes location.
Despite his early optimism, Noades soon came to the conclusion that a League club in Milton Keynes would not draw crowds much higher than those Wimbledon already attracted in south London. "I couldn't really see us getting any bigger gates than what Northampton Town were currently getting at that time, and, in fact, are still getting," he recalled in 2001. "I really couldn't see any future in it. I can't actually see that there is a means of drawing large attendances to Milton Keynes." Abandoning his interest in MK City, Noades sold Wimbledon to Hammam in 1981 for £40,000. Later that year Noades bought nearby Crystal Palace and briefly explored merging that club with Wimbledon.
Luton Town—"MK Hatters" (1980s)
Luton Town, based 20 miles (32 km) from Milton Keynes in Luton and nicknamed "the Hatters", were also seeking a new site at this time. As early as 1960, then-First Division Luton's attendances had been deemed far too low for the top flight by Charles Buchan's Football Monthly, which also considered their ground at Kenilworth Road, in the middle of town, to be hard to get to. At this time the club was already planning a 50,000-capacity ground near Dunstable, to the north-west of Luton, but no new ground materialised. Luton were relegated in 1960 and, apart from the 1974–75 season, remained outside of the top division until 1982–83.
With the team still based at the "cramped and inadequate" Kenilworth Road in 1983, the construction of a new road next to the ground escalated the need for a replacement. The Milton Keynes Development Corporation approached Luton proposing a new all-seater stadium in central Milton Keynes, housing either 18,000 or 20,000 spectators, as part of a leisure and retail development. Luton's owners were receptive to the idea; according to The Luton News, the relocated "MK Hatters" would play home matches in a "super-stadium". This ground would reportedly have an artificial pitch and a roof; Milton Keynes Council would invest heavily in its construction. The Luton chairman Denis Mortimer surmised if the team relocated it would not only garner new fans from the Milton Keynes area but also retain the existing Luton fanbase. He said that the club was financially unsustainable at Kenilworth Road and would go bankrupt if it did not move. The Milton Keynes idea was very poorly received by Luton fans and viewed, in Bale's words, as "tearing the club from its most loyal supporters". Luton fans held protest marches and rallies throughout the 1983–84 season, and chartered a plane to fly over Kenilworth Road during one match pulling a banner reading "Keep Luton Town F.C. in Luton". Some 18,000 Luton residents signed a petition against the club leaving. A consortium of local businessmen attempted to persuade Vauxhall Motors, General Motors' Luton-based British marque, to invest in the club and help with a new stadium in Luton. In Milton Keynes, some residents expressed fears that Luton's arrival in central Milton Keynes might bring with it football hooliganism and threaten local amenities. Some Luton supporters boycotted the club's first home match of the 1984–85 season in protest against the Milton Keynes plans. The wide unpopularity of the proposed move and the consistently vehement opposition from Luton's local support combined to prevent it from occurring. "The directors want our support and our money," said Tom Hunt, a member of a Luton fans' action group against the move, "but they ignore the views of a community that wants to keep its football club. Why should fans pay at the turnstiles to help the club in business so that it can be taken away from us?"
Wimbledon leave Plough Lane
Taylor Report
Wimbledon's success as a club in the top flight of English football was founded on unorthodox financial management and judicious dealings in the transfer market, with many players being sold for fees ranging from six figures to £2 million or more between 1987 and 1992. Rumours of a move or a merger with another London side persisted, leading the club's chief executive Colin Hutchinson to resign in 1987 amid talk of an amalgamation with Ron Noades's new club Crystal Palace or a groundshare at Queens Park Rangers' Loftus Road ground in Shepherd's Bush. It later emerged that Charlton Athletic, who had been Palace's tenants from 1985 until 1991, were woven into the bargain too, to potentially create a "South London super club". Wimbledon were granted planning permission to build a 20,000-seater ground in their home borough of Merton in 1988, soon after they won the FA Cup, but the site was instead made into a car park by a newly elected Labour council in 1990. Wimbledon's desire to relocate was made a necessity in January 1990, when the Taylor Report, which ordered the extensive redevelopment of football grounds, was released - Plough Lane was deemed unsuitable for redevelopment as a sustainable top flight all-seater stadium.
When Hammam purchased the club from Noades in 1981, Wimbledon also owned the ground at Plough Lane; a pre-emption clause existed, however, which reserved the site for "sports, leisure or recreational purposes" only. If Wimbledon Football Club were ever wound up, Plough Lane's owners were legally bound to sell the stadium to Merton Council for £8,000, irrespective of inflation. This clause reduced the possibility of the club losing its home stadium, but it was unpopular with a succession of Wimbledon owners as it made the site practically worthless as real estate. Hammam complained that this limited his ability to borrow money needed to redevelop the ground. Seeking to increase Plough Lane's commercial value, Hammam entered into negotiations with the council to remove the clause in 1990; the eventual agreed price for the revoking of the clause was a sum between £300,000 and £800,000. At least one Wimbledon club director resigned his position in protest.
Even with this clause removed, the team could not afford to redevelop Plough Lane when required to do so the following year. Wimbledon relocated about 6 miles (9.7 km) across south London before the start of the 1991–92 season to share Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park ground. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while Wimbledon arranged the construction of their own new ground in a more local area, but the relocation was still unpopular among fans - and the arrangement would ultimately last for over a decade, and would ultimately have a very different outcome to the one which was widely expected in 1991. Critics alleged that it was at least partly motivated by financial considerations, particularly the profit that might be gained from selling the old ground. The respective Wimbledon and Crystal Palace reserve teams groundshared at Plough Lane after the Wimbledon first team relocated.
Wimbledon at Selhurst Park; Dublin and Belfast proposals
Merton Council had been recommending that Wimbledon relocate to a site in nearby Beddington, but this proposal fell through soon after the move to Selhurst Park. With the inflation in costs brought on by the foundation of the FA Premier League in 1992, the club soon began to lose money heavily. Rumours that the groundshare would eventually result in the Dons and the Eagles merging led Hammam to say "I’d rather die and have vultures eat my insides than merge with Crystal Palace". In 1992 the Greyhound Racing Association offered to redevelop Wimbledon Stadium (less than a mile from Plough Lane) into a 15,000-seater dog racing and football ground. Hammam was outraged two years later when the council, attempting to retain the Plough Lane site for public use, refused to sanction its sale for a supermarket redevelopment that Hammam said would finance a new ground at the dog racing site. Hammam angrily declared he would look elsewhere, and threatened to change the club's name and remove the double-headed eagle device, a symbol of Wimbledon Borough, from the team's badge. "We have been betrayed," he told the press. "The council say they want us back, but when it comes to taking action they don't want to know." In 2023 it was revealed in a note dated 1997 that the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair endorsed the idea of Wimbledon FC relocating to the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland and being rebranded as Belfast United.
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Hammam later claimed to have looked at every possible stadium site in Merton. He initially sought to relocate within south London, examining "seven boroughs" including Tolworth and Brixton. He also began to consider selling the club. In 1994, Wimbledon's Irish manager Joe Kinnear contacted the football pundit and former player Eamon Dunphy to inform him of this and to put to him the idea of moving the club to Dublin. Dunphy was enthusiastic about the idea and became its main proponent in Ireland over the next three years. It was suggested that Wimbledon fans from London could be given free flights to Dublin for home matches, and that British Sky Broadcasting might pay to fly the opposing teams there during the first season.
Opinion polls in the Republic showed consistently high support for the idea of Wimbledon hosting Premier League matches in Dublin, but the League of Ireland argued that this would endanger its existence, and in September 1996 about 300 fans rallied in Dublin under the slogan "Resist the Dublin Dons". Twenty Irish clubs "reaffirmed their opposition" to Wimbledon playing in Dublin the following month; a week later Reuters called the proposal "dead and buried". When Hammam requested talks with the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) top brass in April 1997, they refused to meet him. Vocal opposition from Wimbledon fans emerged—after a friendly match in August 1997 fans holding "Dublin = Death" and "Dons Belong in Merton" placards refused to leave the stadium for two hours. Soon afterwards, Hammam met six leading protesters, who told him that in the event of a move they would start a new non-League club locally.
Playing away from Merton at a supposedly temporary home, Wimbledon set a record for the lowest-ever English top-flight attendance on 22 August 1992 with 3,759 watching the clash with Coventry City, before breaking it twice more: 12 December 1992 against Oldham Athletic with 3,386, and finally on 26 January 1993, drawing only 3,039 fans to a Tuesday-night match against Everton, with reportedly 1,500 travelling from Liverpool. All ten of the Premier League's lowest attendances were Wimbledon home matches in the 1992–93 and 1993–94 seasons. However the general trend was one of a sharp rise—the club's average home attendance more than doubled at Selhurst Park from around 8,000 during the last years at Plough Lane to a peak of over 18,000 during the 1998–99 Premier League season. Wimbledon's fans were a blend between locals who had supported the club since its non-League days and supporters who had defected from other London teams. According to statistics compiled in 2000, 56% of Wimbledon season-ticket holders were locally born (the second lowest in the Premier League), and only 12% had fathers who were Wimbledon fans. Many attended Wimbledon matches as it was cheaper and perceived as safer than other clubs in the capital—Wimbledon had more women and children at their games than any other top-flight club. In 2000, 23% of Wimbledon season-ticket holders earned over £50,000 a year, the second-highest in the division after Chelsea (33%).
Hammam sold Wimbledon to two Norwegian businessmen, Kjell Inge Røkke and Bjørn Rune Gjelsten, for a reported £26 million in June 1997, while remaining at the club in an advisory role. In December that year, Wimbledon were reported to be considering the football and greyhounds option again. Ownership of Plough Lane was transferred from the club to Rudgwick Limited—a company founded in 1993 with Hammam serving as director. With political control of Merton Council having changed, Hammam secured the £8 million sale of Plough Lane to Safeway supermarkets in 1998. He unsuccessfully attempted to gain permission to redevelop a former gas works in Merton during the same year, and soon after entered abortive negotiations over a site in Beddington.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, Hammam shifted his focus to Dublin and other locations outside London—Basingstoke, "Gatwick", Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester, Wigan, Bristol, and Scotland. He later claimed that during this time seven clubs from outside London approached Wimbledon with groundshare offers. Similar opposition to that emanating from the Irish football hierarchy followed after Kinnear spoke of the Cardiff proposal: the Football Association of Wales stated they "will oppose the plan even if it means Premiership football coming to Cardiff". By February 1998, Clydebank of the Scottish third tier were also pursuing a move to the Irish capital. Swayed by Hammam's offer of £500,000 to each League of Ireland club, the same amount to the FAI and "schools of excellence all over the country" in return for support, five Irish teams now backed Wimbledon's Dublin proposal. Later that year, after the Premier League had approved the idea, the lengthy, heated debate in Ireland ended with an FAI veto. With Dublin now not an option, and Scotland similarly barred, Hammam attempted to buy Selhurst Park from Noades, who had sold Crystal Palace in 1998, but still owned the ground. This led nowhere. Hammam finally sold his shares in Wimbledon in February 2000, and seven months later became the owner of Cardiff City. Wimbledon were relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 1999–2000 season. The average attendance at Wimbledon home matches dropped by more than half over the next year, from 17,157 during the 1999–2000 season to 7,897 during 2000–01.
Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium
The Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium or "Stadium MK", led by Pete Winkelman and his company Inter MK Group, was formed in 2000. It proposed a large development in the southern Milton Keynes district of Denbigh North, including a 30,000-capacity football stadium, a 150,000-square-foot (13,935 m) Asda hypermarket, an IKEA store, a hotel, a conference centre, and a retail park. The plan to build a ground of this size was complicated by the fact that there was no professional football club in Milton Keynes and that the highest-ranked team in the town, (another) Milton Keynes City—based in Wolverton in northern Milton Keynes, and formerly known as Mercedes-Benz F.C.—played in the then eighth-tier Spartan South Midlands League, four divisions below the Football League. The developers could not justify building such a stadium for a club of this small stature. Rather than wait for MK City or another local team to progress through the pyramid, Winkelman resolved to "import" an established League club to use the ground.
Winkelman, an ex-CBS Records executive and music promoter, had moved to the Milton Keynes area from London in 1993. He attested to a vast untapped fanbase for football in Milton Keynes—a "football frenzy waiting to happen", he said. Critics of this claim pointed to the apparent lack of public interest in Milton Keynes City and the other local non-League clubs, and argued that Milton Keynes residents interested specifically in League football already had ample access with Luton, Northampton and Rushden & Diamonds all within 25 miles (40 km). Winkelman was the only person in Milton Keynes publicly associated with the project; his financial supporters, later revealed to be Asda (then a subsidiary of Walmart) and IKEA, were kept strictly anonymous. According to an investigative report by Ian Pollock, published in When Saturday Comes in July 2002, neither the Milton Keynes Council press office, the editor of the Milton Keynes Citizen newspaper nor the head of Invest in MK, the council agency encouraging businesses to move to the area, could tell him who was backing the plans. Winkelman told Pollock his supporters were "major business people in MK and some developers. A number of major international partners who've done this sort of thing before."
Opponents of such a move surmised that the stadium was a "Trojan Horse" included in the blueprint to bypass planning rules, and that although the consortium described the larger development as enabling the construction of the stadium, the reverse was the case—Winkelman's consortium, they claimed, had to have a professional team in place right away to justify the ground so the development could get planning permission. David Conn of The Guardian corroborated this assessment. "The whole project was indeed dependent on Asda and IKEA," Conn summarised in a 2012 article, after interviewing Winkelman. "Having seen the opportunity to build a stadium Milton Keynes lacked, and realised Asda did not have a store in the town, Winkelman acquired options to buy the land from its three owners, including the council. Asda would not have been granted planning permission for a huge out-of-town superstore unless it gave the council the benefit of building the stadium. [A League club] would move up, permission would be granted, then [Winkelman] would exercise the option to buy all the land, sell it to Asda and IKEA for very much more, and the difference would be used to build the stadium." Conn retrospectively described this as a "deal of a lifetime".
Talks with Luton, Wimbledon, Barnet, Crystal Palace and QPR
The first club approached was Luton Town, still based at Kenilworth Road, in 2000. As in the 1980s, Luton's owners liked the Milton Keynes idea but the fans strongly opposed it. The Football League stated that no member club could leave its own area and blocked the move. Nevertheless, Winkelman attempted to negotiate a move with two League clubs from London over the following months; he approached Crystal Palace and Barnet, but neither was interested. Winkelman then offered the ground to Wimbledon. He registered several internet domain names with variants of "Milton Keynes Dons" and "MK Dons" in June 2000. Wimbledon initially rejected the Milton Keynes idea.
Røkke and Gjelsten appointed a new club chairman, Charles Koppel, in January 2001. According to Stephen Morrow in The People's Game?: Football, Finance and Society (2003), Koppel had never been to a football match before becoming involved with Wimbledon and "gave the impression of being completely unaware of the relationship that exists between a football club and its supporters." He was interested in an "enabling development" whereby a stadium could be created and funded as part of a business or leisure opportunity—exactly the kind of proposition put forward by Winkelman.
Towards the end of the 2000–01 season Wimbledon and Queens Park Rangers, who were in financial administration, entered discussions over a merger; the new team would play at Loftus Road. The Football League announced on 2 May 2001 that it would give "favourable consideration" to a takeover of QPR by Wimbledon, but that the process would have to be very quick for the merged team to take part in the 2001–02 season. Noades—by now the owner of Brentford, who were themselves interested in a move out of Griffin Park, either to groundshare at Loftus Road or to a move to Woking,—said that Wimbledon would have to give him 12 months' notice to leave Selhurst Park. The majority of Wimbledon and QPR fans quickly made their opposition to a merger known. Following Wimbledon's draw with Norwich City at Selhurst Park on 6 May, Koppel came onto the pitch and told the mostly jeering home fans that "there never was a merger proposal with QPR"; the Loftus Road club had instigated the talks, he said. QPR abandoned the amalgamation plan two days later, citing potential fan alienation, while also announcing that there would be no further talks with Brentford, who would seek and eventually obtain an option to move into Kingstonian's ground Kingsmeadow, before Noades sold his shares in Brentford to Bees United in January 2006, with the club still at Griffin Park.
A month later, Winkelman offered his Milton Keynes stadium site to QPR, promising that the club's name and blue-and-white hooped strip would be kept in Buckinghamshire and that the fans would be represented on the board of directors. "We have real resources to put behind the club," said Winkelman. "They are fast running out of solutions and we are the answer to their problems." QPR dismissed the offer, leading the developers to once again contact Wimbledon later that month. With Koppel in charge, Wimbledon were more receptive this time around—Koppel said that Wimbledon's owners were subsidising the club to the tune of £6 million per year and that such action was necessary to prevent its liquidation. As talks progressed, Winkelman approached the owner of Milton Keynes City, attempting to buy the club name. It soon became clear that the bulk of Wimbledon's support strongly opposed a move of this kind.
Authorisation process
Announcement and rejection; appeal
