Jerry St ClairRoyal Family Precisely!! And as far as it being history & gone away ... IMO it will never be ok to do anything but hate MK Dons. There never has been any other precedent of a new club stealing the position of a defunct club (in this case in the 2nd tier of the league), without earning it. MK Dons will never deserve to be in the league unless they can arrange to get themselves relegated down to the depths of the league pyramid & come back properly. Not going to happen is it. At the very least the whole exercise was a nasty case of franchising in sport .... however I still favour the 'stolen deceased clubs status without ever earning it' scenario. T*ssers ... I seriously hope they go out of business.
Milton Keynes City and Wolverton both went bust because the locals couldn't be arsed to support their team int he lower reaches. The MK Dons project is a money making venture for Pete Winkelman and Asda/Walmart. Any football fan who thinks this is anything other than repellant, is a twat.
Some of the "I'm alright Jack" brigade on here should cast their minds back to Thames Valley Royals and see if they reconsider their opinion.
If it was purely about making money then he'd have build a cheaper shabbier stadium, and he'd happily have let the club fold and die once the development went through. I think anyone who thinks this venture had nothing to do with football is being blinded by their prejudice.
As for MK City and Wolverton going bust because the locals couldn't be arsed to support a team, if Reading FC somehow ceased to exist, and no replacement club was formed, does anyone believe that fans would get behind Reading Town and support them in their crappy league? The fact is very few people want to watch football appalling football with two-figure crowds in "stadiums" whose biggest structures look like bus shelters on their day off. I don't think you can single out the people of Milton Keynes as being apathetic towards football when practically any town without a team of a remotely decent standard would react the same way. St Helens' football team, for example, only drew an average of 65 last year. Rugby might be popular there, but it's no way that popular.
I think the problem is that some still see this as a back or white issue in that you either support the move or are against it. A lot of other people have accepted it's in more of a grey area now, in that they are totally against the whole idea of franchising, but also accept that it has happened and we have to move on from this position. If MK went bust it would solve nothing. Wimbledon wouldn't get their league place back. Winkleman probably wouldn't end up losing money either. All that it'd mean would be another set of fans would lose a football club.
It is strange how nobody seemed bothered about us playing Livingston a few years back, and nobody seems to complain about Airdrie Utd, who are just as much a franchise as MK are.
