Relocation of Wimbledon F.C. to Milton Keynes

The move took the team from south London, where it had been based since its foundation in 1889, to Milton Keynes, a new town in Buckinghamshire, about 56 miles (90 km) to the northwest of the club's traditional home district Wimbledon.

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.

Starting in 1997[5] 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.

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.

[7] 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.

[52] The Gliksten family, which owned Charlton from 1932 to 1982 and had a history of proposing elaborate schemes for the club,[53][n 8] revealed plans to build a community sports complex at The Valley, and to hold a public market at the ground on weekdays.

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.

"[73] 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.

[34] 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.

[4] 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.

[86] 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,[91] before breaking it twice more: 12 December 1992 against Oldham Athletic with 3,386,[91] and finally on 26 January 1993, drawing only 3,039 fans to a Tuesday-night match against Everton,[92][93] with reportedly 1,500 travelling from Liverpool.

[96] 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.

[86][102] 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.

[68][109] 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 m2) Asda hypermarket, an IKEA store, a hotel, a conference centre, and a retail park.

"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.

[128] 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";[129] the Loftus Road club had instigated the talks, he said.

[133] 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.

The letter stated that Wimbledon had already signed an agreement to relocate and "subject to the necessary planning and regulatory consents being obtained" intended to be playing home games at a newly built stadium in Milton Keynes by the start of the 2003–04 season.

[96][137] The League board unanimously rejected Wimbledon's proposed move on 16 August 2001,[136] stating that any Milton Keynes club would have to earn membership by progressing through the pyramid and that "franchised football" would be "disastrous".

[140][141][142] Craig was a controversial choice for some because of his actions as York chief;[138] he had sold his club's stadium Bootham Crescent to a holding company he also owned for £165,000 in July 1999, then in December 2001 announced his intention to evict the team and sell the ground for £4.5 million.

Legal counsel instructed by Olswang appeared for Wimbledon; the League, which had engaged external lawyers for the arbitration hearing, this time did not, deciding that its objections were adequately set out in the written material.

It stressed that Wimbledon (referred to in the statement as "WFC") had lacked its own home stadium for 11 years and asserted that the club did not have "firm and extensive roots within the conurbation from which it takes its name".

[152] Milton Keynes was, the statement said, Wimbledon's "last chance of financial survival"; the move's opponents did not properly appreciate the club's fiscal troubles and "wrongly assume[d] that there is a viable alternative in south London.

"[125] The commissioners heard oral statements from Winkelman, Koppel, Louise Carton-Kelly of the Dons Trust fundraising group, Kris Stewart of the WISA, Nicholas Coward of the FA and Steve Clark, Merton Council's head of planning.

[166] Within weeks, they had done so; the new side, AFC Wimbledon,[2] entered a groundshare arrangement with Kingstonian at the latter club's home ground at Kingsmeadow, in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, adjacent to Merton and about 5 miles (8 km) from Plough Lane.

[178][179][180] Koppel accused the WISA of orchestrating a campaign against the club, and said the Tottenham and Charlton friendlies had been cancelled in part because of concerns that the National Hockey Stadium might not be ready on time (Luton would have been an away match).

[196] The team struggled on and off the pitch for the rest of the season, losing important players regularly as the administrators sold them to keep the club afloat,[113] and eventually finished bottom of the second-tier First Division.

[209] In December 2005 MK Dons set a target of playing at the new ground by January 2007;[210] in February 2007 they revised their proposal to a 22,000-seater stadium ready in July of that year, with provision for expansion to 32,000 (it had originally been intended to seat 30,000).

[218] Jim White suggested in the Daily Telegraph that a move to this site on Plough Lane would "represent the most romantic of homecoming stories" for AFC Wimbledon,[219] but the proposal met with caustic opposition from the dog racing community as it would leave their sport without a track in London.

[219] The plans were put on hold in March 2016 when London Mayor Boris Johnson decided to review Merton Council's decision following objections from neighbouring Wandsworth, but his successor Sadiq Khan reversed this stance in August 2016.