Morality tale of modern sport

As they used to chant at all the best English football grounds before racist abuse cemented its hold, "it's all gone quiet over there". We are not pushy people, but for days now we have waited patiently for some fresh speculation about Premiership football setting down roots here with the miraculous transplanting of Wimbledon from south London to east Belfast.

Two years ago this proposed football miracle was all the rage and scarcely a day went by without some new banner headline or speculative television report. Now it is a story which can hardly get a dog to bark at it. How times change.

The variable that has, of course, been introduced into the mix over the past 10 days has been Wimbledon's relegation from the Premiership. After years of quaffing with the big boys at the top table and pocketing their television money, they must now slum it and scramble around for revenue like everyone else excluded from English football's monied elite.

Wimbledon's fall, with its subtext of a fruitless struggle against all the odds and the sound of broken dreams, might seem like a bad script that somehow slipped through the Home and Away net. But do not be suckered in by any cheap sentimentality.

Wimbledon deserve none of your sympathy, and it is far better to read what has happened as a morality tale of modern sport in which everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

The club's rise from non-League football to an FA Cup victory and back down the other side again has been cloyingly recounted in recent weeks. Wimbledon were the small club it was all right to like, first of all because they represented no real threat to the established order, and second because they appeal to the sensitive side we all like to believe lurks somewhere just under the surface of every sporting obsessive.

All of which is very cosy, until you take a look at the wider picture. It is then you realise that the businessmen who control Wimbledon, and those who were keen to jump into bed with them at the slightest encouragement, are devoid of either sentiment for the club or feeling for its supporters.

Why else would a plan have been formulated to move the club out of its home and into another country without even paying lip service to the views of those same fans? All the men in suits could see were the pound signs flashing in front of their eyes, and the intention to swap the ground-sharing arrangement and small crowds of London for a purpose-built stadium and the football-starved masses in Ireland smacked of little more than cold-hearted avarice. The lack of respect for the club and its history was a disgrace for all concerned.

Dublin was the favoured port of call, and two years ago a scheme to relocate Wimbledon was building momentum. But to their enduring credit the FAI stood firm in their opposition. It fought the Wimbledon plan on two fronts, claiming the moral high ground to protect its own National League structures and then drawing on the legal arguments and the backing of FIFA to copperfasten its position.

In the circumstances it would have been easy for the FAI to bend the knee and crumble in the face of the forces lining up against them. Instead they held the line and emerged with reputation intact and integrity enhanced.

Wimbledon, though, were not giving up that easily and they instead diverted their attentions 100 miles north. They must have been delighted with the initial response, because Belfast proved itself to be infinitely more receptive to the club's covetous advances.

This, do not forget, was a Belfast consumed with post-Good Friday Agreement positivity, and how better to mark your arrival into the brave new world than to get yourself your own little football team to show off to everyone else?

Details of the approaches that were made or the discussions that followed have largely been kept from the public and the media, but the prevailing impression is that the Northern Ireland Office was not averse to the overtures

from Wimbledon. The arrival of the club was perceived as one way of squaring a particularly tricky circle.

One strand of the government's regeneration masterplan for Belfast was the provision of some form of national stadium in Belfast. With the days of full public subsidy for such schemes fading into distant memory, some form of public/private partnership would be required; Wimbledon, as the anchor tenants of any new venue, would have fitted the bill perfectly.

Like the FAI, the mandarins of the Irish Football Association rowed in against the plan and were adamant that FIFA and the law were on their side. The difficulty was that the low standing of both the Northern Ireland international side and the domestic league significantly damaged their negotiating position.

We may never now know how far down the road these plans went, but the entire project may well have come closer to fruition than many imagine. In any event, their momentum was stymied by developments elsewhere.

The slowing down of political progress to little more than a crawl cooled the excitement of those who had allowed themselves to get a little carried away by all the Agreement hype. As the politicians struggled to get past first base, the small matter of an English football team in Belfast assumed a very low priority.

Wimbledon also quickly lost interest as money talked in the form of the buy-out of the club by a Norwegian consortium which has since presided over their disastrous relegation to the English first division. If the new owners now decide to cut their losses and run, they are unlikely to find many takers in Belfast - or any other city for that matter - for home games against the likes of Huddersfield Town or Crystal Palace. The aborted attempt to rip a football club out of its London home and parachute it into a city hundreds of miles away was yet more evidence of the cold heart that beats at the core of modern sport.

That is why Wimbledon now deserve none of our pity. The efforts to subvert what should be sport's natural order were unequivocally wrong and there should be no tears shed at the way in which it has all come off the rails. In sport, as elsewhere, what goes around also comes around.