Everyone
in football is now familiar with the concept of 'tapping up' and fans
always hate it when this happens to one of their players. So why is
it that Franchise customers think it was perfectly OK for Winkelman
and the Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium to 'tap up' an entire
football club? Tough one to swallow, now isn't it? Do the same
Franchise customers that claim Milton Keynes has 'saved' something of
Wimbledon FC also claim a player has been 'saved' when another club
unsettles him and goads him into a transfer? Because that's precisely
what Winkelman and the MKSC did to Wimbledon FC – they took a club
already having problems and deliberately sought to destabilise it
further by dangling the carrot of a 'free' stadium in Milton Keynes
in front of the owners. Winkelman told them exactly what he knew
would make the pound signs (or krone in the Norwegians case) light up
in their eyes, just as one entices a player to want away from their
club with the offer of more money. The fact that to this day
Winkelman still maintains the delusion (I'll be generous in this
instance and not call it a bare-faced, total lie) that it wasn't
about poaching another community's club, shows just how deep in
denial some still are about the reality of what happened.
I've
touched on this subject before of course, but to remind of just how
blatant the tapping up was, let's revisit some of the other attempts
made. First off, the confirmation from the FA Commission that it was
Winkelman and the MKSC who approached Wimbledon FC:
“10.
In August 2000 Mr Peter Winkelman of the Milton Keynes Stadium
Consortium (MKSC) approached Mr Koppel. MKSC is a group
of local business people who together with stakeholders and community
groups are working to secure the provision of professional football
in Milton Keynes.”
Wimbledon
FC hadn't issued a 'come and get me' plea to Milton Keynes – this
was Winkelman popping up out of the blue, giving Koppel a nudge and a
wink and telling him that MK would build his football club a stadium
that the club would own and wouldn't have to pay a penny for. Too
good to be true for Koppel... and that's exactly how it turned out,
but it didn't stop his greed from getting him to pursue it.
Previous
attempts at tapping up clubs had ended in failure, most famously as
reported by QPR's Trust.
(http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Football%3A+QPR+MAY+LEAVE+LONDON.-a075009045
and http://qprreport.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=4057)
It is telling to remember that QPR fans were told the same thing we
were about going to Milton Keynes – move or die! And just look at
where QPR are now. Sure, they've had some major ups and downs and
upsets along the way, but far from being their only option to be
saved, Milton Keynes now looks like it would have been as disastrous
for them as it was for Wimbledon FC. And it's telling to note that if
this had gone through, we'd probably now be looking at the 'MK Hoops'
in League 1, which tells one everything one needs to know about how
absurd it is that a Milton Keynes team continues to have Wimbledon's
nickname in its team name.
Luton
had been the first to have Winkelman's beady eye settle on them and
just look at the promises he was making them too:
“Winkelman
said: "If Luton Town Football Club decided to move here it would
still be an integral part of the town's culture."In fact, young
players involved at youth level would benefit immensely from being
part of a huge regional team. "A combined club called Luton MK
would respect the Hatters past but, more importantly, embrace the
future by providing more professional academies, training facilities
and club affiliation right across the region."“
Check
out that “Luton MK” comment. Bear in mind this is long before he
told the FA Commission that he supposedly wanted to retain the Wimbledon FC identity
(Commission extract, “77. He is an advocate for retaining the
identity of WFC and would work with the Football League and WFC to
achieve this, if we gave permission for the relocation. He talked of
renaming the area “Wimbledon Park” or renaming roads and of the
similarities between the new town of Milton Keynes (now almost 30
years old) and WFC.”) Clearly this is a man who was prepared to
tell whatever audience he had in front of him whatever they wanted to
hear, regardless of his actual intentions, just so long as he got a
Football League team to facilitate his property deal.
And
let's not have the history re-writers try to warp things, Winkelman
was relatively open at the time about having approached many clubs:
“Winkelman
has made no secret that he tried to persuade Barnet, Luton and QPR to
move to Milton Keynes before hitting the jackpot with Wimbledon.”
(Also
interesting to note this observation in that 2002 piece: “The
local newspaper, the Milton
Keynes Citizen, has
received no letters expressing the kind of moral outrage heard in
SW19. Driving through the city you understand why. The strangely
antiseptic atmosphere makes Milton Keynes the perfect location for
such a franchise move. It is hard to glean any sense of community.
Houses are peculiarly hard to find. The city centre is defined wholly
by its gigantic shopping centre - the kind of structure which in any
other city would be on the windy outskirts, on some brownfield
industrial estate.” It really does seem to have been a do-nothing
place – do nothing to make the move happen and do nothing to stop
it.)
Wimbledon
FC were tapped up by Winkelman and, as the report above says, in the
greedy but foolish owners of the club he hit the jackpot. Wimbledon
FC wasn't 'saved', it was tapped up with false promises that still to
this day haven't been met – the stadium isn't finished, the
football club doesn't own it, nothing of Wimbledon FC survives in MK
and all the recommendations from the FA Commission were signed away
in the 2006 accord. Winkelman still owns Franchise FC, Winkelman owns
the stadium and Winkelman is the one still profiting from his own
piece of tapping up. And Franchise customers wonder why this whole issue won't go away, when they continue to put money in Winkelman's pocket and treat him as some sort of hero. When you know the truth about what Winkelman did, you'd never pay him a penny.
No comments:
Post a Comment