State of Play by Michael Calvin

Author:Michael Calvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

PART THREE

The Club

CHAPTER ELEVEN

McDons

‘There have been horrible moments. My thirteen-year-old daughter, as she was then, was abused on the telephone at two o’clock in the morning. To get rid of them she reminded them it was paedophilic and the police were listening in to the conversation. I can’t be proud that happened because of something her dad did.’ Pete Winkelman, owner, MK Dons

PETE WINKELMAN, THE man who supposedly stole a football club, invokes fear and loathing on a grand scale. To summon the spirit of many of his critics, who have the obsessional devotion of Harry Potter followers, he is football’s Dark Lord, a malign, murderous presence whose mutilated soul deserves to linger in limbo for eternity.

Meet him in the flesh, in the black granite edifice of Stadium MK, and he has the distracted air of an assistant spells master at Hogwarts, rather than the menace of Voldemort, the evil wizard. The shoulder-length bird’s nest hair, rumpled dark suit and open-necked shirt have become a personal motif.

His walk, a stiff-shouldered scurry, is that of a man in a hurry. His talk, often a stream of consciousness delivered at speed in surprisingly soft tones, suggests the neurons are careering around his brain like dodgems driven by hyperactive children. Ideas, opinions, theories and conclusions collide, yet he rarely conducts major interviews and is careful to the point of pedantry.

When, understandably enough, he asked for the context of this book, he waited almost a month, until he had read its inspiration, Arthur Hopcraft’s The Football Man, before confirming our conversation. He took me to the fourth floor of the stadium’s integral 304-room Hilton hotel, greeting maids along the way, to give the optimal view of the pitch before descending to a deserted third-floor bar, where he sipped Ribena and had to be nudged from a series of monologues.

His instinct is to look forward, to a future in which MK Dons match the growth of the new city they represent and develop into a Premier League club within the type of global framework pioneered by Manchester City. His problem is his inability to escape the magnetic field of the past, and the debilitating reality of the present.

MK Dons’ relegation to League Two for the first time in a decade in May 2018, aligned to AFC Wimbledon’s survival in League One, was celebrated like the Relief of Mafeking by his many critics. The pustule of bitterness generated by the transplantation of a football club precisely 67.8 miles from the south-west London borough of Merton exploded messily.

Many have stopped listening but, as Winkelman tells it, in June 2003 he received a call from administrators, who intended to liquidate Wimbledon FC the next morning. They informed him of FA approval for a move to Milton Keynes, but needed ‘half a bar’, half a million pounds, to keep the ‘hopelessly insolvent’ original club, which had debts in excess of £20 million, alive.

It took a year ‘with many false twists and turns’, including a late challenge from the tax authorities, to emerge from administration.

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