|
|
 |
Music promoter Winkelman is heading a consortium determined to take the financially troubled club to Buckinghamshire and stepped in to help pay players' wages last month.
Wimbledon look set to return to Selhurst Park until plans for a temporary move to the National Hockey Stadium can be revived, but in a statement this morning, Mr Winkelman said he is providing financial support to the administrators to get the Dons to Milton Keynes as soon as possible. Emergency
And he is convinced they will one day be playing at a 28,000-seater stadium in Milton Keynes, whatever the financial cost.
He said: "We have stepped in with some emergency funding and we are working with the administrators to get Wimbledon to Milton Keynes as soon as possible."
"We only made the move to put something in when it became clear we had to do something or the club would face the potential threat of liquidation."
"The administrators are running the club, they are appointed by the High Court. We are providing financial support to the administrators running the club." Determined
Talking about the developments of the past few weeks he said that when they set out on this path nobody knew that the club would go into administration but he is determined not to give up.
"We didn't know Wimbledon was going to go into administration, we didn't know we would have to raise up to £10million to make sure it could see its way to the new stadium, but are we accepting those challenges? Absolutely" he said.
"After two years of turmoil and the kind of distress and hurt we've caused, to not make Wimbledon come to Milton Keynes would have been a disaster for everybody and wouldn't have been worth the grief we've had to endure." Ideal
He went on to explain why Milton Keynes is the ideal location for Wimbledon FC.
"Milton Keynes has the biggest population in Europe without a football team" he explained. "It's not right to have generations of kids grow up without football there. I'm not going to stop until I can't do it."
"Wimbledon is simply the only club with permission from the Football Association and the Football League to relocate to Milton Keynes. If you're asking me whether I would go through this again to bring another club here, I don't think I would."
"There is an enormous commitment to finish what we've started. We're going to make it happen." 
| garry payne, leighton buzzard |
Friday, 08-Aug-2003 21:37:44 BST |
|
| i agree with adrian from cambridge, but from a neutrals point of view its too good a chance to miss,first division football just ten minutes from home i do feel for the real wimbledon supporters though. |
| Adrian, Cambridge |
Tuesday, 15-Jul-2003 22:10:10 BST |
|
| Peter Winkelman, please read and inwardly digest, your comments on the size of Milton Keynes and how it must have league football are meaningless. There are many, many large towns and citys that do not have league football, they may not have the largest population compared to MK, but that simply does not matter! These places have teams fighting up the leagues, and this is what Milton Keynes should be doing, not poaching a club from it's roots with a big v sign to it's long standing supporters. What is the point of having a team that does not bear the name of the town or has no history associated with it. Milton Keynes has consistently failed to support it's clubs, I don't mean the supporters, but the businesses and the people that run them. So let's steal a league place from somewhere else and do it the easy way. I firmly believe that it will take many years for thousands of football fans to accept the Dons in Milton Keynes, and I hope any residents who want to jump on this bandwagon can handle the abuse that you will certainly receive at your shiny new ground if it is ever built, and any of you that can be bothered to go to away matches. Most of the football world can see that this is terrible for the game, you will not be welcome anywhere, it will also be interesting to see how many of the 'committed' fans will travel down to London while the team is playing at Selhurst park. And to all the people that accuse the former fans of deserting the club, how would you like it if you had to play away everytime you wanted to carry on watching the Dons? all the car sharing schemes in the world could not make up for dragging a club 70 miles to it's new home. Finally a big thank you to the football league for being so pathetically weak with this matter. |
|
