AFC Wimbledon

AFC WIMBLEDON

Welcome to the Dons College here at Longford

The Greatest Story in Football

It was the moment when a miracle really happened. A moment that had been almost 30 years in the making, a moment so special, so coveted and yet so outrageously impossible it felt like we would never see it happen.

Only it did. It happened on November 3, 2020. That was the day when The Dons returned home to Plough Lane and completed the greatest story in football.

In 2002, the Wimbledon football club we knew and loved ceased to exist. Snatched away from our fans and our community, the club was shamefully allowed by an FA commission to be airlifted to another town 70 miles away, where it carried on under a different owner and different supporters.
The commission even underlined their disgraceful decision with an ominous warning. Launching a new club to replace the one that had been stolen from us would not be “in the wider interests of football”.

Undeterred, four of our fans – let’s name them because they are heroes – refused to be beaten. Ivor Heller, Kris Stewart, Marc Jones and Trevor Williams contacted the London FA and relaunched us under a new name: AFC Wimbledon. We were consigned to the Combined Counties League – five divisions below the professional Football League – and we started all over again.
Only there was a fundamental and profound difference. This time we were owned by our own supporters in the shape of The Dons Trust with an executive board elected by the fans.
Never again would we be at the mercy of private owners with their own egotistical agendas.

There was another profound difference as well. The entire history of Wimbledon Football Club remained ours. When the paperwork was drawn up for the new reincarnation, our date of birth didn’t say 2002 – it said 1889, when our predecessors had played their first games on Wimbledon Common.

The ensuing years were owned by us and nobody could take them away. We first moved to our legendary home, Plough Lane, in 1912; we won the coveted FA Amateur Cup in 1963, we were elected into the Football League in 1977 after winning a hat-trick of Southern League titles – and we won the FA Cup in 1988 with a famous 1-0 triumph over Liverpool at Wembley. We gave birth to the infamous Crazy Gang and we made a Womble our official club mascot!