MK Dons' steady rise up the division's since their controversial formation a decade ago continue with promotion last season. QPR fans are only too well aware that Wimbledon's fate could have befallen our club instead.
A line from MK Dons manager Karl Robinson during a recent defeat — there have been a few, they've lost seven of the last nine — might ring a few bells down the South Africa Road.
Robinson is a bright young manager who has diligently learned his trade and promoted a deeply unfashionable club playing in a cavernous, mostly empty, stadium on a shoestring budget. He recently praised his players for sticking to the footballing values that have got them there, despite Championship teams being much better than them at it and beating them regularly.
Easy, says Robinson, to knock the ball about and attack when you're running over the top of League One, scoring 100 goals and keeping more than 20 clean sheets. Brave, he reasons, to stick to it when it stops working against the bigger boys a division higher. MK Dons play out from the back, crowd opposition penalty boxes, and play to win games.
There's certainly plenty to admire about them, if only they were somebody else.
They have a habit of spotting a good young manager. Paul Ince had given an indication that he may have plenty to offer a bigger club with the job he did at Macclesfield prior to two reigns at MK but Roberto Di Matteo was hired as a rookie and went onto win promotion with West Brom and the European Cup with Chelsea. Now Robinson — the league’s youngest boss at 32 when he was appointed and not even somebody who could bring an impressive playing career CV to the interview — has a burgeoning reputation that should be drawing more approaches from higher up. So far, only really Blackpool have had a notable sniff and he did well to turn that down.
Despite only being in existence for a decade, the club has a prospering youth set up that has already graduated Sam Baldock to the first team (sold to West Ham) in the past and has also produced the raw, unpredictable Daniel Powell for the present team along with full back Adam Chicksen (now at Brighton) and a smattering of others. Dele Alli has gone straight into Tottenham's first team and the England squad after his summer move to White Hart Lane. What QPR would have given for three first team graduates from their youth set up in the same period of time.
But, for 99% of people, and QPR fans in particular, there is nothing whatsoever to admire about MK Dons as a whole.
The club was formed in 2004 when they finally got round to changing the name of Wimbledon, a club they found at death’s door in South London and moved 65 miles north because Asda and Ikea needed a community stadium to gain planning permission for their latest giant money printing presses and couldn’t afford to wait for the existing non-league team in Milton Keynes to get good.
Even Pete Winkelman, the man who concocted the plan to bring an existing Football League team to the area, has now admitted the way he went about it was wrong. He told The Guardian’s outstanding investigative sport reporter David Conn: "I did a deal that was wrong and the owners [of Wimbledon at the time] were wrong. I'm not proud of the way football came to Milton Keynes."
And your first reaction to that was probably something along the lines of ‘whoa steady on Poirot’ or ‘no shit Sherlock’ because here in the land where football was born the idea that a struggling football club can just be carted 65 miles out of its community and become a new entity altogether is so obviously wrong that it should never have been entertained in the first place. But, it is nevertheless an important admission, because if even the one crazy loon who thought of this and somehow followed through with it now acknowledges it was a mistake it means the chances of anybody ever being bold enough to try such a thing again are remote.
Sadly, Winkelman kept talking after that though. The defence that he couldn’t simply put money into the local Milton Keynes non-league side and grow that naturally — it was two divisions higher than where AFC Wimbledon began — because Asda and Ikea needed a Football League club to justify a stadium to achieve planning permission for super stores is deplorable.
I’ve been to Stadium:Mk and seen how well designed it is compared to some of the other hell holes that the likes of Leicester and Coventry (‘proper football clubs’) have stuck up in retail parks and called home. It is, like so many other new stadiums, a place with no soul, surrounded by by-passes and distribution centres and fast food outlets. But where the "King Power Stadium” and "Ricoh Arena” do at least have the redeeming feature of a famous old football club housed within their concrete hearts, all Stadium:MK has is the omnipresent reminder of why the club exists: a supermarket selling crap food and an outlet for cheap Swedish furniture.
Winkelman's other defence, that Wimbledon fans deserted their club, forced it into administration and then didn't buy it therefore leaving liquidation as the only alternative to Milton Keynes conveniently airburshes out a meeting he held in The Adelaide pub in Shepherds Bush where he proposed to take QPR to Milton Keynes instead. Had the QPR fans abandoned their club as well then? Was QPR going to the wall? They seem to have done alright since despite being dreadfully mismanaged pretty much ever since the door of the pub was slammed behind him.
Winkelman often comes across very well, and now he has his football club he seems keen to run everything the right way: the managerial appointments, the team building, the youth set up, the ticket prices — all superior to the way QPR go about things on a fraction of the cost. They're building support in the local community (attendances are up again following promotion, 19,000 were in for the visit of Leeds, though less than 6,000 came to a Tuesday night against Cardiff) the way he’s drawing young supporters to their local lower league club, the focus on disabled facilities at the ground, the disabled teams they run in the community — it’s all admirable stuff.
They're relatively sound financially too. Debt of £11.2m to June 2014 after several years of cost cutting while success was maintained on the field. The overall wage bill was down £800,000 to £4m in that set of accounts — QPR's was £77m in their last set. The debt of the parent company Inter MK is £5.4 million, it recently repaid £7m of bank loan to Santander.
The football community seems to have mellowed towards them as well, the barbs about being a "franchise" not quite as vociferous as they once were. Perhaps that's because AFC Wimbledon have grown organically and won their own place back in the Football League.
But for fans of QPR, who Winckleman had his eye on at one stage, there will always be something not quite right about our visitors this Saturday.
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