AFC Wimbledon

Wimbledon, in south-west London, spent a year without a football club to call its own after the Football Association cleared the way, on 28 May 2002, for Wimbledon FC to relocate to Milton Keynes, nearly 100 kilometres away. Two days later, a group of supporters led by Kris Stewart, Marcus Jones and Trevor Williams founded a replacement from nothing, determined that the borough should keep a team playing under its name even after the original club moved on and, in 2004, became Milton Keynes Dons.

AFC Wimbledon started in the Combined Counties League, English football's ninth tier, and worked its way up through five promotions, taking the League Two play-offs in 2016 to complete the climb into the Football League — the first club formed in the twenty-first century to get there. Along the way came the Combined Counties League title in 2004, the Isthmian League First Division in 2005 and the Conference South in 2009, each one a rung rather than a destination.

The rivalry with Milton Keynes Dons, known as the Dons derby, still carries the weight of that original split, and matches between the two are treated as anything but routine fixtures by fans on both sides. The Dons, as they are known, wear blue with touches of yellow, colours carried over from the old Wimbledon FC.

In 2020, the club returned to Plough Lane, close to its old Wimbledon home, ending years of ground-sharing elsewhere in London. The stadium, known commercially as the Cherry Red Records Stadium, holds 9,215 seated supporters.