AFC Wimbledon exists because a football authority decided in 2002 that a club could be moved sixty miles up the M1 and keep its place in the league. Wimbledon FC, winners of the FA Cup fourteen years earlier, were relocated to Milton Keynes. Supporters held a meeting in a pub, agreed they would not follow, and formed a new club within days.
Trials were held on Wimbledon Common that summer. More than two hundred and thirty men turned up to be looked at by a manager who had been appointed a fortnight earlier. The side that emerged entered the Combined Counties League, the ninth tier of English football, and played its first competitive match in front of a crowd larger than most clubs three divisions above.
What followed was six promotions in nine seasons. The club returned to the Football League in 2011, and by 2016 was in the third tier — the same division as the franchise that had taken its predecessor's place. The two clubs have since met repeatedly, and supporters treat those fixtures as something other than ordinary league games.
The final part was the ground. Wimbledon had left Plough Lane in 1991 and never returned. A new stadium was built two hundred yards from the original site and opened in November 2020, behind closed doors because of the pandemic. The club had spent eighteen years as tenants elsewhere in south London before playing at home again.
AFC Wimbledon remains majority-owned by its supporters through the Dons Trust. Season tickets, shirt sales and a fan-funded bond issue paid for a substantial part of the stadium. It is a structure almost no other club in the English league shares, and it exists because of what happened in 2002.
