Franchise FC: Inventing a heritage in Milton Keynes
How do supporters of a football club with no history manufacture a mythology?
It’s a drizzly late November afternoon. I’m whizzing on a Lime scooter from Milton Keynes Central towards Stadium MK. My excitement is palpable. I’m ticking something off my footballing bucket list as I head to watch one of English football’s most fascinating rivalries: MK vs AFC Wimbledon.
As I glide through the wide open cycle paths and green embankments of Milton Keynes, I’d be lying if I wasn’t desperate to see a Wimbledon victory.
I’ll admit, I’ve got skin in the game. Over the course of the last three years I’ve become acquainted with several Wimbledon supporters through my football policy work at Fair Game and my research project at the Museum of London. Resultantly, I know the story of this rivalry – one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of English football –by heart. The narrative beats are simple.
After years of financial mismanagement and numerous attempts by Wimbledon’s owners to move the club away from London, on 28th May 2002 an FA independent commission made the unprecedented decision to green light plans to move the club to Milton Keynes, leading to the club’s eventual re-branding as “MK Dons”.1 This move sparked mass protests from Wimbledon supporters, who relaunched the original club under a new name - AFC Wimbledon – just two days later.2 The new club would be owned and governed by an elected body of Wimbledon supporters in the form of a Supporters’ Trust. Crucially, this new club claimed continuity with the original Wimbledon FC, claiming the history of the original club as their own. This decision has since been ratified by the FA, with the club’s historic trophies, honours and memorabilia eventually returned by MK to the Wimbledon.
This is how one of the most bizarre and intense rivalries in English football came to pass – a club acrimoniously split in two and forced to play itself. On this grey November afternoon, a day of reckoning has arrived. Having been drawn against each other in the FA Cup – AFC Wimbledon and Milton Keynes are set to clash on the field for the 16th time. And I can’t wait.
As I duck inside, my agenda for the day is clear. I’ve come with the express intention of writing a story about AFC Wimbledon’s unique heritage of political activism and struggle.
As the game unfolds, I’m tickled by the proceedings, as Wimbledon convincingly put MK to the sword with a 2-0 victory.
It’s a game full of delicious comeuppance. Not only do Wimbledon play MK off the park, but MK midfielder Connor Lemonheigh-Evans – who has committed the cardinal sin of moving to MK having previously been on loan at Wimbledon – is sent off in front of a delirious away end. As the ground empties, the 1,200 travelling Wombles can be heard to sing:
“You stole our club and you fucked it up” and “where were you when you were us?”
My desire to see a win for football’s communitarianism spirit over corporatism satiated. But as I saddle back up on my bike, it strikes me that if I’m trying to write a story about this game from a heritage perspective, AFC Wimbledon are not the story at all.
Granted, AFC Wimbledon are a club with an incredibly strong sense of history and identity. They are now in possession of their clubs’ historic trophies. They have forged a unique sense of community and selfhood from their history of struggle, fan ownership model and remarkable story of returning from the brink. In fact, there is no club in English football with fanbase bound by such a strong origin narrative and profound sense of self.
But Milton Keynes are the opposite. Most clubs can draw on their status as centuries old institutions as a means to foster a strong sense of identity, create a deep connection to their locality and bind together supporters into communities.
MK have no such luxury. Instead, they face a unique triple threat when it comes to forging a strong sense of heritage-linked identity.
First, they are a franchise club with no history or links to their new locality prior to their much contested foundation in the early 00s. Second, they are based in Milton Keynes, itself a relatively listless new town founded as late as 1967. This means there is no developed local heritage landscape for the club to plug into. Third, MK are widely despised by the wider footballing community. The franchise nature of their foundation disturbed the deeply place-bound sensibility of English football culture to such an extent that most neutrals fundamentally contest MK’s right to exist. When Saturday Comes – one of Britain’s leading football magazines - still refuse to even acknowledge MK at all.
These combined factors have precipitated a fascinating situation whereby MK stand as a football club which seems to be fundamentally devoid of one of the key constituent parts of any football club culture – a heritage.
So as my train pulled away from Milton Keynes Central, I resolved to turn my focus away from AFC Wimbledon, and onto MK. My goal? To look back on my experiences during the game and answer a simple question: how does a football team with no history seek to build a sense of heritage from scratch?
Search for continuity
One of the biggest themes of my research to date has been the importance of “continuity” in building meaningful football cultures. Football clubs not only provide a thread through the lives of individual fans but between generations.
Much of that sense of continuity is predicated on the football club in question existing for a significant period of time, as supporters draw on the often centuries old histories of football clubs to provide a wider sense of anchorage.
In Milton Keynes, the development of a deep sense of historicity and continuity is simply not possible. MK remain defined by the context of rupture through which they came into existence, leaving supporters scrambling for any semblance of historical continuity as a basis for forging a coherent identity.
Step in Dean Lewington.
No footballer represents the ideal of continuity more than Lewington. He is not only MK’s captain and longest serving player, but holds the record for the most career league appearances by any player for a single club in the history of the English Football League, appearing for MK a remarkable 915 times at time of writing. Now aged 40, Lewington has become a totemic figure for MK supporters and a particular figure of vitriol for Wimbledon supporters. As the only surviving player who joined MK as a result of the original franchise move, Lewington is seen as totally synonymous with the club.
Though MK’s shiny modern ground is largely devoid of the expressionistic fan-led interventions that make many English stadium special, MK supporters have made an exception for Lewington.
Stretched out on the upper tier is a large tifo in tribute to Lewington’s continued service to the club. The strapline next to Lewington’s likeness is simple: “then, now, forever”.
It’s a statement that encapsulates the unique value Dean Lewington has to MK. Though the club remains defined by a sense of rupture and modernity, Lewington’s two decades of service is the sole temporal thread and source of continuity associated with the club and its culture.
For a club devoid of any sense of historical anchorage, Lewington’s remarkable longevity gives supporters a basis to start building the sense of deep time and continuity necessary for the development of a strong heritage identity.
Building a cache of legends
Immediately to the left of Lewington’s tifo, another sprawling canvas was stretched across the black seats of the upper stand adorned with the likeness of the late George Baldock.
At the time of my visit, the football world was still reeling from the news of Baldock’s passing at the age of 31 just weeks prior. Baldock is most famous for his stintplaying for Sheffield United and his unlikely journey to become a Greek international. What is less known is that Baldock actually started his professional career at MK. He was born just 20 minutes outside the city, joining the club as a child before coming through the youth ranks to play over 100 times for the first team. That makes George Baldock the closest thing MK have to a local hero.
In the aftermath of his death, both the club and its supporters went to great lengths to pay tribute to Baldock, immortalising Baldock in the ground in tifo form. On the one hand, this may suggest that MK are starting to build a distinct sense of place identity in their new home. For a club devoid of a deep links to its locale, George Baldock’s status as a local boy made good gives supporters an opportunity to celebrate a strengthening link between club and town.
But taken together, the banners of Baldock and Lewington in Stadium MK illuminate that MK supporters are starting to develop another crucial element of their heritage consciousness: a specific cache of legends attached to the club.
A key emergent theme from my research is the ways in which football supporters of individual clubs tend to be bound into communities by a shared sense of history. Crucial to this is a mutual adoration of a specific collection of iconic figures – players, managers, club staff, even some supporters – who become reified as legends of the club.
As Lewington and Baldock are promoted to legendary status, we can observe MK supporters slowly building their cache of iconic figures in real time. These figures will be crucial to the development of a distinct sense of heritage in Milton Keynes, serving as the major protagonists in the MK mythos and imbuing supporters with the necessary shared sense of history to forge a strong heritage identity.
Embrace the hate
But if Milton Keynes supporters are slowly developing a sense of historical continuity and shared mythology through a set of notable ex-players, the tifos suspended above the pitch were not the most eye catching expression of heritage I experienced during the game.
Shortly after kick off, there was a unique moment of performance from the MK supporters, which illuminated an incredibly strong sense of identity based on a mutual understanding of the clubs’ heritage – or rather, their lack thereof.
On the ten minute mark a distinct chant arose from the vociferous away end: “you know what you are, you franchise bastards, you know what you are.”
As I sat smirking in my seat, I was surprised to hear an immediate retort from the MK fans behind the goal: “we know what we are, we are the franchise, we know what we are.”
In a further surprising moment of reflexivity from the MK supporters, they followed that up with a rendition of Millwall’s famous club anthem: “no one likes us, no one likes us, we don’t care”.
It was a moment of clarity. Perhaps it is MK’s lack of history and heritage that has the potential to become just that.
No one is more aware of MK’s pariah status in English football than their own supporters. They are aware of the hostility against them. They are aware of the “plastic” nature of the club. They are aware of their lack of legitimacy founded on the historical circumstances of their formation. Above all, MK fans are aware that to everyone else in English football they are the franchise.
It is here, then, that we find the singular, historically rooted experience that gives MK supporters a starting point in forging a shared heritage.
It will take years for the club to build the kind of dense mythology attached to virtually every other football club and fandom culture in English football. But here and now, MK do have one single historically-rooted identity which gives them a sense of difference and binds supporters together through shared experience.
Their lack of history itself.
Bland, J. (2023) Finding Home in Football. Museum of London. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PXZRR3JtfjMVHZXJwu0I6m9uTNsBO0_X/view.
Dunn, M. (2020) We Are Home: The Complete History of The Dons and the Journey Back to Plough Lane. London: Vision Sports Publishing. pp. 214-248.