English soccer’s biggest modern-day grudge match stems from a rare, U.S.-style team relocation that harbors contempt and hatred more than two decades later.
The latest chapter of the incendiary rivalry between AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons will be played out on Sunday in the first round of the FA Cup, the oldest knockout competition in world soccer.
The teams’ history includes off-field disorder, on-field brawls, interventions from authorities and mud-slinging that might seem petty to neutrals but couldn’t be more serious for the protagonists.
“It really is the North Carolina vs. Duke of (English) football,” said Sam Spencer, an American-based AFC Wimbledon fan.
It all goes back to 2002, when the owners of Wimbledon FC — the winner of the FA Cup in 1988 and a team known as the “Crazy Gang” — went in search of a better home stadium and were allowed to uproot the club 90 kilometers (55 miles) from south London to Milton Keynes, a commuter town north of the capital. It became known as MK Dons.
Such a relocation is common in American sports — the list of cities that have lost pro teams includes Oakland, San Diego, Seattle, Houston and Baltimore — but not in England. It was regarded as a betrayal by long-time fans of the original Wimbledon team, who responded by forming a team within weeks: AFC Wimbledon.
The phoenix club started out in the ninth tier, the bottom of the English soccer pyramid, and rose rapidly up the league system.
This season, AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons are in the same division — fourth-tier League Two — and have also been drawn to meet in the FA Cup, which the original team famously won against the odds 36 years ago after beating mighty Liverpool in the final.
Any meeting between AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons is seen as a fight for identity as much as a soccer match, with both sets of fans typically goading each other and laying claim to be heirs of the original club.
“Some of us refuse to even call it a derby because they literally see the other club as an abomination,” Spencer, who is a member of the ‘Across the Pond Dons’ supporters’ group, told The Associated Press.
“They see Milton Keynes as something that doesn’t exist and is just counter to everything football is.”
For this reason, expect incidents around the game. Like there was 12 years ago when the teams first met, also in the FA Cup.
Jon Otsemobor scored a stoppage-time winner for MK Dons that day in 2012 and he remembered being briefed ahead of the game by the club’s former owner, music producer Pete Winkelman, about the significance of the fixture.
“When we got drawn against AFC Wimbledon, he (Winkelman) came down to the training ground and arranged a meeting. I thought this is a bit weird,” Otsemobor told the AP in a phone interview. “But he said, ‘Lads, listen, I need to explain to you how important this game is.’ To be fair, it was a bit of a history lesson on MK.”
Midway through the first half, a plane — chartered by AFC Wimbledon supporters — flew over MK Dons’ stadium tugging a banner that read: “We are Wimbledon.” There were reports of facilities being damaged.
Otsemobor recalled coming out for the warmup and seeing the stadium being packed not just with fans of the two teams but of other clubs who had come to cheer on AFC Wimbledon, given what it had been though.
“There were supporters there from Blackpool, Blackburn, all different teams,” Otsemobor said. “I said to one of the staff members, ‘Why are people from different clubs here?’ They were there to protest against MK for what they did.”
Since then, the threat of trouble around the fixture has led to measures including visiting MK Dons fans requiring a police escort into the ground. In 2017, AFC Wimbledon was charged with breaching regulations for not referring to MK Dons by name on the scoreboard or the match program. It led to English soccer authorities arranging mediation between the teams in a bid to improve their relationship.
Still, things remain spiky.
In a league match in March this year, there was an on-field brawl at the final whistle following a 94th-minute winner by AFC Wimbledon. The teams were charged with failing to control their players and one AFC Wimbledon player, Harry Pell, was fined and banned after admitting to deliberately kicking balls at MK Dons fans during the warmup.
“The situation got the better of me,” Pell later told a disciplinary panel, which found that one shot, deliberately fired wide of the goal, struck an 11-year-old girl in the face.
Away from soccer, the name Wimbledon is synonymous with the grass-court tennis tournament known for its traditions and decorum.
The soccer team clearly retains its scrappier side, which chimes with that Crazy Gang squad of the 1980s and early ’90s that contained Vinnie Jones, a player-turned-actor who typically plays tough guys in Guy Ritchie films.
And for Otsemobor, the “hatred will always be there” — particularly from the AFC Wimbledon side.
“AFC Wimbledon will say they are THE Wimbledon, but the real old Wimbledon that we remember are MK Dons,” he said. “I can’t see it happening ever again in today’s game — you couldn’t just take a football club somewhere else and change the name.”
Spencer recognized that, and said team or franchise relocations is something American sports fans “accept as the price of doing business.”
“Definitely the U.K. isn’t desensitized to it yet and that’s something that, for American audiences, is hard to grasp,” he said. “Because we have probably seen 50 professional teams move in our time.”
Steve Douglas is at https://twitter.com/sdouglas80