Lieutenant Dan wrote:
Pete,
You built the dream… and you broke it.
You brought this football team to Milton Keynes 20 years ago. You promised Premier League football, and to be fair, I think anyone who has at least two brain cells knows that such a promise was fanciful. But at the start, we appreciated the ambition.
We had some bloody good years, especially with Karl. Watch and learn, Pete: Karl and Andy Cullen got this club and the fans more than you ever did - or at least more than you could be bothered to do. They were the two people you employed that understood how to connect with fans, and not just poke their head out of the woodwork when Jonathan Park and BBC Look East came to town and you had a chance to get on the telly.
At that point, around ten years ago, you had a large fanbase that was strongly emotionally engaged with the club. The Championship season didn’t work out, but most right-thinking people can understand that on-pitch matters can go wrong. And similarly, good and bad decisions can be made in terms of the team: for every Robbie Neilson and Graham Alexander, there’s a Scott Twine and a Rhys Healey. That’s how lower-league football works. As fans, we understand that, in the main.
But look at where we are now: off the pitch, just as much as on.
Let’s be honest: you haven’t given a flying fuck for a good six or seven years now. Cutting back on the matchday experience with shit beer at London prices served by agency staff who barely know what day it is. But that’s OK: as I understand you told one connected fan: “it’s a football ground, what do you expect?”
For the biggest game of the season, shutting stands people have sat in for many years, where they’ve made bonds with each other - and allowing other season ticket holders to have their seats sold from under them before they had the chance to buy the tickets themselves. One fan said he might never see an elderly fan ever again because of that decision. These are people who have become friends over many years - but you don’t give a fuck, as long as you can save a couple of hundred quid on stewarding.
The way you have treated loyal and passionate fans is fucking disgusting. I’ve done more to promote this club than you ever have. I wrote the programme for Dean Lewington’s testimonial in 2014 (in association with Lee Scriven, who did a superb job to help) - I note how my mum and I were completely blanked by everyone in Club Platinum that day, but that wasn’t unexpected. I raised more than £4000 for Willen Hospice along with a very passionate group of fans in 2016 when we walked to Fulham. Me and Alby of this parish had the initial idea of Orange4Lewie. I spent £600 to go on the team bus to Brentford when I was Skint Eastwood.
These are just a few of many of the things I’ve done over the years to promote YOUR club.
And yet you don’t even know who I am, and you don’t want to know who I am. You don’t give a shit about me, or the hundreds of people who care a million times more about this club than you ever will. I wonder why any of us fucking bother.
You think we’re the ‘great unwashed’ beneath you. There are countless people who have tried to engage with ‘your’ club - and it is ‘your’ club, not ‘ours’ - and met constant resistance at every turn. We want to further the club more than you do. People who had their phones hacked. People who ended up physically ill because of the stress of dealing with your employees.
The very demographic (young MK natives without any memory of the move) that you want to attract after all these years have formed a group called DonsAction. And yet they’re so pissed off with you that (one recent meeting aside) they can’t even be bothered to engage with you.
They’re good, loyal, hard-working fans who have realised that trying to work with you is like farting against thunder. They’ve realised that you don’t care about them, so they don’t care about you. The #DonYourWhite campaign on Saturday showed the strength of feeling - your club got massively shown up by volunteers who care more about it than you ever have.
A lot of this negativity would have been avoided if you’d just been straight with people. No nonsense, no hype, no bullshit: just tell people what’s going on. Football fans want transparency and you’ve given us fuck all. Just the usual fans forum platitudes.
And look at the recruitment policy off-pitch. For fuck’s sake, you’re apparently trying to recruit a new CEO on £55,000 a year. I earn more than that living on a narrowboat writing blogs for a living. Do you honestly expect to get anyone who knows what they’re doing for that kind of money? Ten years ago, I interviewed for a job on your media team paying £20k… not getting that job is one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Ultimately, you’ve completely failed at running a football club. You haven’t brought in enough fans for entirely avoidable reasons. You’ve failed to make the right decisions at the right times. But worst of all, you’ve actively gone out of your way to disenfranchise (no pun intended) the very people who might actually want to help you drive engagement.
Supporting MK Dons has changed my life for the better. Four of my very best friends have been made out of being Dons fans. I’m best man for one of them later this year, and we’re going to the Euros for the stag do. You don’t understand these relationships, and it’s achingly clear you don’t want to understand them, either.
All of the above has absolutely nothing to do with the move, or how the Dons came to be in Milton Keynes. It has everything to do with your corporate, cold, aloof, arrogant and condescending way of running a football club.
I hope that ivory tower up there, sitting in front of a whole tier of empty that you voluntarily closed, was worth it while you watched us ship five at home to Crawley across the ‘TV arc’.
You built the dream… and you broke it.
My goodness you've changed your tune, the irony...
Every time I dare question the motives of our messiah in the past, you shot me down?!
Apology accepted.