Wimbledon Football Club relocated to Milton Keynes in September 2003, 16 months after receiving permission to do so from the Football Association on the basis of a two-to-one decision in favour by an FA-appointed independent commission. The move took the team from South West London, where it had been based since its foundation in 1889, to Milton Keynes, a new town in Buckinghamshire, about to the northwest of the club's traditional home district Wimbledon. Hugely controversial,. "51. The proposal has met with considerable opposition, and not just from the WFC fans. ... Respected football writers in our national press were generally supportive of the Football League's decision [to block the move]. ... A Parliamentary All Party Committee ... is opposed. ... Merton BC is opposed to the move and believe a stadium can be built in Merton ... the Football Association, the Football League, the FA Premier League and the Football Conference Ltd have all provided statements which ... weigh against permission being granted for a move of this nature and distance. ... [M]ost of the hundreds (over 600) of communications we have received have argued against the proposal. They have generally been from individual WFC fans. 57. Supporters' associations and individual fans from many other clubs and people from as far afield as the United States, Australia (Wimbledon Supporters Downunder), Russia and Norway have also expressed similar views." the move's authorisation led a group of Wimbledon supporters to form AFC Wimbledon, a new club, on 30 May 2002. The relocated team played home matches in Milton Keynes under the Wimbledon name from September 2003 until June 2004, when following the end of the 2003–04 season it renamed itself Milton Keynes Dons F.C. (MK Dons).

Wimbledon F.C. spent most of its history in non-League football before being elected to the Football League in 1977. A series of club owners believed that its long-term potential was limited by its home ground at Plough Lane, which never changed significantly from the team's non-League days. Meanwhile, the Milton Keynes Development Corporation envisaged a stadium in the town hosting top-flight football and was keen on the idea of an established League team relocating there. The Wimbledon chairman Ron Noades briefly explored moving Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in 1979, but decided it would not lead to larger crowds. Charlton Athletic briefly mooted a relocation in 1973, and in the 1980s the Milton Keynes Development Corporation offered a new ground to Luton Town.

Wimbledon rose through the professional divisions unusually rapidly in what has been called a "fairytale". By 1986, they had reached the First Division, the top-flight of English football. In 1991, after the Taylor Report ordered the redevelopment of English football grounds, the team entered a groundshare at Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park stadium, about east of Plough Lane. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while the Wimbledon chairman Sam Hammam sought a new stadium site in south-west London, but the search took longer than anticipated. Hammam proposed new locations for the team outside London, including Dublin, a decision that drew criticism from many Wimbledon supporters. He sold the club to two Norwegian businessmen, Kjell Inge Røkke and Bjørn Rune Gjelsten, in 1997 and the following year sold Plough Lane for a supermarket redevelopment.

Starting in 1997 a consortium led by Pete Winkelman proposed a large retail development in Milton Keynes including a Football League-standard stadium, and offered this site to Luton, Wimbledon, Barnet, Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers. Røkke and Gjelsten appointed a new chairman, Charles Koppel, who announced on 2 August 2001 that Wimbledon intended to relocate to Milton Keynes. Koppel said the club would otherwise go out of business. After the League refused permission, Koppel launched an appeal, leading to an FA arbitration hearing and subsequently the appointment of a three-man independent commission by the FA in May 2002 to make a final and binding verdict. The League and FA stated opposition but the commissioners ruled in favour, two to one. The vast majority of the team's fans switched allegiance to AFC Wimbledon in protest. Wimbledon F.C.'s relocation was delayed for over a year by the lack of an interim ground in Milton Keynes meeting Football League standards. In June 2003 the club went into administration; Winkelman's consortium injected funds to keep it operating and paid for the renovation of the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes, where the team played its first match in September 2003. Winkelman's Inter MK Group bought the relocated club in 2004 and concurrently changed its name, badge and colours. The team's new ground, Stadium MK, opened three years later. MK Dons initially claimed Wimbledon F.C.'s heritage and history, but officially renounced this in 2007. AFC Wimbledon received planning permission for a new ground on Plough Lane in 2015, which they eventually moved into ahead of the 2020–21 season.

Background

Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes, in northern Buckinghamshire, was established by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government as a new town on 23 January 1967. Named after the village of Milton Keynes already present on the site, it was formed primarily as a London overspill settlement following the recommendations of governmental studies in 1964 and 1965 to build "a new city" in Buckinghamshire incorporating existing towns such as Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Wolverton. This site was chosen as it was equidistant from London and Birmingham, close to main roads and railways, and near Luton Airport. About 40,000 people lived on the Milton Keynes site before 1967; the government set a target population of 250,000.

When Milton Keynes was founded, no football club within its boundaries was professional and none played in the Football League. The teams most advanced in the English football league system or "pyramid" were the United Counties League sides Bletchley Town and Wolverton Town & B.R., and Stony Stratford Town of the South Midlands League; New Bradwell St Peter and Newport Pagnell Wanderers (Newport Pagnell Town from 1972) would join the South Midlands League in 1970 and 1972 respectively. Nevertheless, the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, created by the government to oversee the town's planning and construction, envisaged a stadium in Milton Keynes capable of accommodating a top-flight football team.

Accession to the Football League; club relocation in English football

In English football, the relocation of teams away from their traditional districts is unusual because of the nature of the relationship between clubs and their fans: the local football club is regarded by most English football supporters as part of the local identity and social fabric rather than as a business that can be transplanted by its owners at will. As a result, any relocation plan would be strongly opposed by fans in the club's original area, and unlikely to succeed in most new locations due to the existence of established teams in most towns and cities that would already have secured the loyalty of local football fans. John Bale, summarising a study published in 1974, writes that, in the view of most fans, "Chelsea would simply not be Chelsea" were that club to move a few miles within the same borough to Wormwood Scrubs.

The geographic redistribution of the 92 Football League teams was considered a possible eventuality by some around that time, including Sir Norman Chester, who headed an investigation into the condition of English football in 1968. Before the 1986–87 season, clubs could not be relegated out of the League's Fourth Division. The bottom four clubs had to apply for re-election by the other member clubs at the end of each season, alongside any non-League teams who wished to take their place, but the replacement of an established League side in this way was quite rare. From the inaugural post-war season (1946–47) through to 1985–86, clubs already in the League were supplanted on only six occasions. "New communities have developed ... which lack clubs in League membership," Chester reported, in 1968. "Amalgamations of old clubs would provide vacancies for new clubs to enter the League". Merging football clubs in England has been described as "anathema" to the fans. Moore concluded "Merged clubs lose fans as well as gain them. If formed way back, “Bristol United" would probably have fared better than either [Bristolian clubs] City or Rovers have done independently, but there is too much history and animosity to merge now.". "Alternatively", Chester also added, "the movement of established clubs to new communities could provide a way both of saving old clubs and at the same time bringing League football to new and growing areas." Closely fitting this description, Milton Keynes was identified as a potential site for such a relocation.

At the end of the 1978–79 season, 20 leading non-League clubs left the Southern League and the Northern Premier League to form the Alliance Premier League. This national non-League division started in the 1979–80 season; it was called the Football Conference from 1986 to 2015, when it became the National League. Since the 1986–87 season, the champions of this league have received promotion to the Football League, with the League's bottom club being relegated in exchange. This was expanded to the Conference champions and the winners of a promotion play-off before the 2002–03 season, with the worst two Football League clubs being relegated. The situation of the Football League "closed shop", which for nearly a century effectively barred most non-League clubs from accession, therefore no longer exists. Any club in the English football pyramid (which also includes some clubs from Wales) can potentially win enough promotions to reach the Football League or the Premier League, the separate top division formed in 1992.

Precursors in Scottish and English football

According to the Football League's statement to the independent commission on Wimbledon F.C. in May 2002, the English League "had allowed temporary relocations for good reasons outside 'conurbations' in respect of certain clubs where it was intended the club would return, but there has been no previous occasion on which the Football League had granted permission to a club to relocate permanently to a ground outside its 'conurbation'." Clubs in the English professional ranks that have relocated to other locales within their traditional conurbations include Manchester United and Woolwich Arsenal, who moved and respectively in 1910 and 1913. South Shields of the Third Division North relocated west to Gateshead in 1930 and renamed themselves Gateshead A.F.C. The commission reported that there was no Football League precedent for a move between conurbations, but stressed that there was direct precedent for such a move in Scotland.

Promotion and relegation in and out of the Scottish Professional Football League was not introduced until the league system's reorganisation in 2014; until then it was nearly impossible for sides outside the League to join. Scottish League membership therefore remained largely restricted to well-established cities as opposed to new towns. Two Scottish League teams left their metropolitan districts for new towns during the 1990s. Third-flight club Clyde moved from Shawfield Stadium (close to Rutherglen in the south-east of Glasgow) to the new town of Cumbernauld, about to the north-east, in 1994, and a year later Meadowbank Thistle, a struggling Edinburgh club in the fourth tier, relocated amid fans' protests about west to another new town, Livingston. Clyde kept their original name, while Meadowbank renamed themselves Livingston Football Club.