The Truth in a Name

The home of the club that takes its name from the town of Milton Keynes

We have a new name to conjure with in the League One (no, for those of you like me who remain challenged by the ludicrous new titles employed by the Football League brain boxes, that is not our league. It is the one below). Ladies and Gentlemen, the Milton Keynes Dons have arrived.

Yep, that’s right. That veneer of legitimacy provided by retaining the name Wimbledon, the insistence that this remained the Wimbledon Football Club which once belonged in the London Borough of Merton, has been swept away. The process is now complete.

I know that I’ve talked about this before, on a couple of occasions. But there is now one final chapter in this unedifying tale to be told before we close the book.

Now, all the talk of Charles Koppel, the farcical FA constituted enquiry, Pete Winkelman et al can be dismissed. This never was about Wimbledon FC, because at the first possible opportunity they have ceased to exist. Whether or not we believe their claims that there was no future for the club in Merton – and the evidence, incidentally, suggests they were talking rubbish – they have not merely relocated it in order to save it. They have abandoned it, sold it up the river, and pocketed the dividends.

There is now no club called Wimbledon in the Football League. Nor is there a club which once was Wimbledon. It has been replaced with a club which takes its name from the town it represents. Milton Keynes, or as they snappily put it, MK. The old club died a long time ago, and now the name reflects it.

It was, I suppose, good of them in a sense to retain the Dons part of the name. Gives them a link to that past, an acknowledgment that this isn’t really Milton Keynes’ team to call their own. It’s the part of the new name which gives the game away: they are impostors, a team grafted onto a community which simply hadn’t earned a professional football club in their own right.

But really, they have no right even to call themselves ‘The Dons’; it does not belong to them. ‘The Dons’, like the Womble logo and all the other paraphernalia which attaches to the character of any football club, belong to a club which play in Merton, under the Wimbledon banner.

What the authorities who authorised the emigration of a football club, and the personalities who desired the change – people with no background of interest in football – failed to understand is that a football club is more than a corporate entity. Its home, supporters, identifiable characteristics – all go to making the club a whole. Burnley is club which represents the town of the same name, which plays at Turf Moor steeped in a past and are identifiable by the Claret and Blue which they wear. You simply change that character at will, and once you change that most fundamental part of the identity, the home, then the rest of it falls away. Quite simply you are taking it away from its like support system, its Oxygen, and it will necessarily, ultimately, fail.

These fans can claim the name of 'Wimbledon' as their own

Perhaps the most telling indictment of the lot is that the Wimbledon supporters – by whom I mean those who were left behind, to support their own club in the depths of the non-league world – are glad that the Milton Keynes club has dropped the Wimbledon tag. It means that at least they can reclaim the name as their own, even if they cannot reclaim Football League football quite so soon. It saves them from repeating the answer to the question they have been asked so many times, that surely having their club moved is better than it ceasing to exist. The title which will be found in the newspapers on a Sunday morning make this stark: this is not their club, their club did cease to exist on the day the move was sanctioned.

Ultimately, no doubt, football will not allow this experiment to succeed. Not, at least, in a football sense: the lack of support for the move in Milton Keynes, and the outrage it has provoked across the football family, will see that the club will slip away quietly to an ignominious end which few will mourn. But I doubt that will be of too much concern to Pete Winkelman and his allies. By then, they will hope to have used it for their purposes, and they will have their brand spanking new retail park just off the M1. MK Dons FC will have served their purpose and can be cast away.

At least, though, the Wimbledon name will not be attached to that perversion of football principle. Their part in this unhappy story is finished. Quietly, the last layer of legitimacy has been stripped from the transfer of a football club across the country. You can only hope this is the last club, and set of supporters, which have to play a part in the crowd scenes of such a bitter tragedy.