It’s all come down to one final penalty kick. If the club captain and terrace hero can put the ball past the goalkeeper our heroes achieve their aim; a nine-year odyssey reduced to a single moment of condensed tension. A club formed by disgruntled fans who had their team taken away from them are on the verge of completing the most implausible comeback in football history. One tight camera shot follows the blue shirted figure as he runs up.
The player eschews all subtlety and simply leathers the ball as hard as he can. The net billows, the player wheels away in triumph and several thousand fans go completely bonkers. The watching audience can barely hear the commentator yell, “The fairytale is complete.” Fade to black and cue end credits.
What a ridiculous cliche of a movie script; what an overwritten overwrought Hollywood ending that would be. It’s about as plausible as a group of allied prisoners of war drawing a match with the Nazis despite a biased referee and then managing to hide an injured Pelé in 1940s Paris by draping him in an overcoat.
Except, the first story is actually true. Real life threw up the denouement of a sporting story that the makers of Air Bud: World Pup might have thought a bit saccharine. The facts are as follows: nine years after AFC Wimbledon was formed by fans who felt abandoned when Wimbledon FC moved 50 miles up the M1 to Milton Keynes to become MK Dons, they made it back to the Football League after completing their fifth promotion via a play-off final penalty shootout, against similarly wronged-by-the-football-authorities Luton Town. They went from open trials on Wimbledon Common to League Two inside a decade. If that’s the mundane reality, how sensational does the fiction have to be to beat it?
That’s the challenge for American author John Green, who announced yesterday he has secured the rights to the AFC Wimbledon story. Not only has it proved almost impossible to make a film about football where the football action itself is plausible, his source material is, frankly, ridiculous. I’m still not quite sure that day in Manchester really happened, and I was there.
I vividly remember a committee meeting many years earlier (they always make for great films, don’t they, committee deliberations?) at which people argued that the aim of being back in the Football League inside a decade was so over-ambitious as to invite ridicule. But an aim it became, overseen by Bill Nighy-look-a-like Wimbledon AFC chief executive Erik Samuelson.
The club has one other major ambition left to fulfil, and right now, Wimbledon fans would probably most appreciate a remake of the Arsenal Stadium Mystery, recast with Boris Johnson explaining his recent decision to call in Merton Council’s unanimous approval for a new stadium development back on Plough Lane.
Despite the uselessness of most films about football, Green – the best-selling American author of young adult fiction and one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World according to Time magazine – certainly knows more than most about creating stories for a wide audience. He says he was first attracted to the club across the pond because of its origin story. He has confused his huge (and largely American) fanbase with increasingly frequent references to his love for this community-owned protest movement turned sporting triumph for some time. It was presumably therefore a logical step for him to use the movie studio clout he has gained through adaptations of The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns to pitch what he describes as “the greatest underdog sports story you’ve never heard”.
Now he is a club sponsor and his Nerdfighters slogan, DFTBA, is on the players’ shorts (yes, really). Apparently it stands for Don’t Forget to Be Awesome. The question is: can he Depict Football that Brings Audience?
