Moving the goalposts

Dublin has been mentioned as Wimbledon's next home, but Mike Ticher warns that the club have a lot to lose if they move to Ireland

Jean-Louis Dupont, the lawyer who won the Bosman case, obviously thinks he knows a thing or two. A thing or two more than UEFA, maybe, but it would be foolish to get overly pleased with yourself about that. And the news that he has been hired by Wimbledon to further their bid to move to Dublin has only added to the apparently unstoppable flow of guff eman-ating from the Dons’ corner on their plight.

“Wimbledon is a club without an audience and Dublin is the biggest city in Europe without a football club,” Dupont proclaimed. The second part of that statement is insulting enough to clubs who Wimbledon would have looked up to not so long ago. But the claim that Wimbledon have no fans is even more extraordinary.

In a sense you can hardly blame Dupont. After all, his statement only echoed the views of Sam Hammam and Joe Kinnear. Back in September, for example, Kinnear unleashed a tirade of abuse against the Wimbledon fans who booed his team off at half-time against Barnsley. “I’m disgusted with the supporters,” he said. “People ask where all the money has gone here. Take a look at the fact we’ve got just 4,000 home fans turning up for a Premiership game, and there’s your answer.”

The truth of the matter is rather different. Last season Wimbledon averaged 15,156, and so far this season they are pushing 17,000. Let’s put that into context. In that last season before the Premier League, a solid 16,000 would have left the Dons looking down on seven other clubs in the First Division, while moneybags neighbours Chelsea pushed a distinctly mediocre average of 18,684 punters through the turnstiles.

No-one at that time was talking about their imminent demise. Yet now Hammam, Kinnear and their new European friend would have us believe that without a move away from Selhurst Park, the loveable antics of the crazy gang will soon be a thing of the past. “When relegation comes,” Hammam cheerily prop-osed recently, “as it surely will if we do nothing, we will go into freefall. Financial collapse would follow”. “We go out of this league, we go out of the next league, it’s freefall right through to the Third Division,” Kinnear confirmed in his best Private Fraser voice.

Some of this nonsense can be written off as bluster aimed at prodding Merton Council into some long-overdue action to help Wimbledon find a proper site in the borough. It’s also true that circumstances have changed radically since 1992 – but almost all in Wimbledon’s favour. Teams with small away followings like Luton, Oldham and Norwich have fallen out of the top division, to be replaced, mostly, by bigger draws. And with the “Ground Full” signs going up everywhere else, a trip to Selhurst Park is increasingly attractive to London-based fans of teams from all over the country. Above all else, it is the Sky money that has widened the gap between the Premier League and the rest, and Wimbledon’s admirable achievement in holding their status has earned them their full whack.

On the downside, the lack of their own ground has no doubt damaged Wimbledon’s ability to milk the profits from merchandising and sponsorship that have bloated the turnover of other Premiership clubs. But even with that handicap, it’s hard to see why Wimbledon should necessarily struggle even if they went down. Last year’s three relegated clubs haven’t, and Wimbledon’s Selhurst landlords have come back twice without doing anything conspicuously right.

“We have given them too much – Cup semi-finals and million-pound players – but I have to work with supporters like that,” Kinnear railed after that Barnsley game. He doesn’t, of course. But they have to put up with his absurd doom-laden posturing, and so do the rest of us. It almost makes you wish they would go to Dublin and then go down – and see how many fans they pulled then.

From WSC 133 March 1998. What was happening this month