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Tony Blair wanted to move the Wimbledon team to Belfast at the start of his first term as prime minister. Formerly confidential state documents, which have just been released, include a memo from 1997, when the former British prime minister and Labor came to power - about talks about moving the Dons to Northern Ireland.
At that time, the English Premier League team, Wimbledon, was playing at "Selhërst Park" of Crystal Palace. They were forced out of their much-loved home at Plow Lane at the start of the decade as football moved towards all-seater stadiums.
The note said it would represent a "significant breakthrough if Belfast had a football team playing in the English Premier League". He added that such a move "must be able to build strong cross-community support and provide a positive unifying force in a divided city."
The move was mooted in the year before the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the 30-year conflict known as the Troubles, which would have seen Wimbledon's team renamed Belfast United, as well as the construction of a stadium with 40,000 seats.
Wimbledon's 1988 FA Cup winning side struggled for support in the 1990s, with crowds dropping to 3,000. In a separate development in 1998, then owner Sam Hamam considered relocating the club to Dublin, although League of Ireland clubs rejected the plan.
Wimbledon left London after they were controversially allowed to move to Milton Keynes and rebrand as MK Dons. The move sparked protests across football and led to a group of disgruntled fans forming AFC Wimbledon, who worked their way up the lower tier pyramid, reaching as far as League One.
MK Dons and AFC Wimbledon, who still play, are now rivals in League Two, separated by just one point and one place in seventh and eighth, and there is no love lost between the supporter groups.
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