FA Cup 2nd Round preview: MK Dons v Oldham Athletic

The romance of the FA Cup lives on, but not in tomorrow’s 2nd Round fixture between MK Dons and Oldham Athletic at Stadium MK.

You can just about see what Pete Winkleman was thinking when he bought Wimbledon FC in 2004. His rationale was that Milton Keynes was the biggest conurbation in the country that did not have a professional league football club. Coincidentally (meaning not at all coincidentally), Wimbledon FC had relocated to the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes the season before.

Winkleman reckoned that if he built a shiny new stadium in the middle of his shopping development and moved an existing professional football apparatus in, the people of Milton Keynes would go football crazy. The club’s rise to the Premier League and beyond was just a matter of time…so went Winkleman’s thinking.

To be fair to Winkleman, he held up his end of the bargain in spectacular fashion. Stadium MK, formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, has almost everything you could want in a football ground. Its football-first design makes it one of the best in the country for views, concourse facilities, accessibility, corporate options, comfy seats.

Likewise, the development around the stadium is every club owner’s dream: big-name retailers, free parking galore, a hotel attached to the ground – a Hilton no less – a sizeable concert arena out back, plenty to eat and drink if you like chain restaurants and fast food.

Alas, nearly 20 years on, 98% of the 300,000 or so people of Milton Keynes show absolutely no signs of wanting to play their designated role in Winkleman’s dream. As a result, Stadium MK lacks the one essential ingredient of a football ground: football supporters. The ground capacity is 30,500. The official average attendance last season was 6,819. It’s not entirely obvious to those who’ve seen matches at Stadium MK whether that number is bums on seats or tickets sold/distributed. MK Dons were asked for comment and chose not to say anything. We all know what that means.

Being an optimist, Winkleman would probably say that his stadium was one fifth full. To everyone else, his stadium was, on average, four fifths empty. The badness of Winkleman’s idea is illustrated perfectly by the fact that the stadium design includes the possibility of easy expansion to more than 40,000 seats, but there were never any plans for reducing capacity if it became expedient to do so.

To really kill the FA Cup romance, MK Dons have no pedigree in the competition and, moreover, an indelible stain involving it. When Winkleman bought Wimbledon FC, he also bought the official replica FA Cup awarded to winners of the competition. The vast majority of Wimbledon FC fans did not buy in to the move to Milton Keynes – bitterly

resisted it in fact – and instead got behind AFC Wimbledon, which was formed by a group of supporters who hated MK Dons at the level of concept.

For reasons best known to himself, Winkleman kept the trophy and maintained the view that MK Dons rather than AFC Wimbledon were the continuation of Wimbledon FC.

“What’s wrong with that?” is a rarely asked question to which the answer is as follows: Wimbledon’s win in 1988 wasn’t just any old FA Cup win. It remains one of the greatest games in the competition’s history. Nobody gave the Dons a prayer against Liverpool – then as now champions of England and one of the best teams in the world – but they scored from a corner in the first half and then pulled off an hour-long rearguard action for the ages. Dave Beasant, the Wimbledon keeper, became the first to save a penalty in the FA Cup final. The heritage embodied by that specific trophy is a bigger deal than, say, the trophy won by Man Utd when they beat Man City in 2024.

After a long and acrimonious to-and-fro over the trophy, Winkleman finally saw something a bit like sense and handed it to Merton Council, the south London borough where Wimbledon FC were based. In turn, Merton handed the trophy to AFC Wimbledon, and it sits in a glass cabinet in the Plough Lane foyer to this day. The FA recognises AFC Wimbledon rather than MK Dons as former winners.

All’s well that ends well, right? Not in football it isn’t. The antipathy towards MK Dons that Winkleman generated first by moving a club to a different city, and then by denying AFC Wimbledon their trophy, is football-wide and permanent. Winkleman’s absurd claim that MK Dons won the FA Cup in 1988 is a big reason why his stadium is four fifths empty rather than one fifth full.

Nobody likes going to Stadium MK, but Latics fans like it less than most: they have never seen their team win there, and the aggregate score in 11 games over the years is 29-8. The sides played out a no-score bore in the season’s opening League Two fixture – one of only four league points gained by Athletic in front of the vast tracts of empty padded seats.

Latics are way behind MK Dons in the League Two standings: MK started the season as title favourites and are three points off the top after 18 games. Latics are 16th, nine points behind.

MK Dons will start as favourites, but much depends on whether the managers – Paul Warne for MK Dons, Micky Mellon for Latics – commit their first-string players. Both could make a case for resting and rotating for the sake of league progress and (they won’t say this, but I will) they could both profit from not shunting a league fixture down the road to accommodate an FA Cup 3rd Round tie on or around 10 January. We’ll find out tomorrow afternoon how they’ve decided to approach it. Yes, the 3rd Round draw gives you the opportunity of a lucrative away tie against the highest-ranked team, but you have precisely the same chance of a nothing tie against the lowest ranked.

Latics took 1,891 supporters to Milton Keynes for the league match earlier in the season – an abnormally high number because it was their first Football League fixture after a three-season absence. This time last season, 1,167 Latics fans travelled to Leyton Orient for their FA Cup 2nd Round match. At the time of publication, Latics had sold 710 tickets for tomorrow’s game. It’s only £15 a go as well. That, in a nutshell, is the Winkleman effect.

Whatever happens tomorrow, no one will label this match or the result “romantic”. No MK Dons fixture ever is, especially when it takes place in Winkleman’s folly. A Kuwaiti consortium bought the club lock, stock and barrel off Winkleman in August 2024. You can just about see what they were thinking.