Why Kingstonian?

“I’m convinced the club is going to die . . .”

Gary Ekins, Kingstonian’s former press officer

The Kingstonian Football Club is a club without a home. Their previous grounds, the Kingsmeadow, built in 1989, had been sold to AFC Wimbledon for 2.4 million pounds in 2003 and then leased back to Kingstonian for a small fee. However, in 2016, AFC Wimbledon sold the stadium to Chelsea, who no longer wanted Kingstonian as tenants. It didn’t help that crowd sizes at Kingsmeadow had dropped below 250 on a few occasions.

By the summer of 2017, Kingstonian was out. They now share grounds with the Corinthian-Casuals at King George’s Field in Tolworth, a ten minute’s drive away south from Kingston upon Thames.

My goal is to save this club from dissolution and obscurity. This will be evidenced by leading this wandering club back to a permanent home grounds and raising attendance.

“In the 1990s we had a team that was strong and played good, attacking football.”

Phil Windeatt, Kingstonian supporter

Kingstonian won the Isthmian League, level 6 of the English football pyramid at the time, in 1998 and then won the FA Trophy back-to-back in 1999 and 2000. This success was largely due to the efforts of manager Geoff Chapple, who had recently won the FA Trophy with Woking in 1994, 1995, and 1997. When Kingstonian was relegated in 2001 and financial problems due to overspending emerged, Chapple was sacked and the club quickly fell into administration and ultimately, irrelevance.

Kingstonian’s late 1990’s success was due to their attacking style of football, led by David Leworthy. Leworthy had signed for a club record fee of £18,000, and played from the 1997-98 season through 2000, scoring 17 goals in each of his last two seasons with the club.

My next set of goals is to play attractive, attacking football, add another FA Trophy victory to the collection, and win a league title on our journey up the football pyramid. In my previous Football Manager saves, I have struggled to win the FA Trophy so I want this goal to push me to put more emphasis on that particular accomplishment. If we progress without winning, I suppose I’ll have to live with it.

“I can see they’ve been a better landlord than many might have been but that doesn’t mean what they have done is right.”

Ali Kazemi, Kingstonian supporter

As stated earlier, AFC Wimbledon’s sale of Kingsmeadow to Chelsea put Kingstonian in limbo. While AFC Wimbledon had previously rented Kingsmeadow to the K’s at a reduced rate for many years, business is business. It seems AFC Wimbledon put the profits from the sale of the grounds ahead of Kingstonian interests.

According to the Kingstonian board, they asked Chelsea if they could continue to use the grounds and were told “no” in no uncertain terms. Did AFC Wimbledon ask Chelsea what would happen to Kingstonian before the sold it? Did they warn Kingstonian that Chelsea wanted the ground for their own use? AFC Wimbledon told The Guardian in this article that Kingstonian never asked for an extension to stay at Kingstonian. Some allege the Kingstonian board never considered that Chelsea would allow them to stay, which created a sense of defeatism and made Chelsea’s decision easier. This seems really hard to believe that the Kingstonian board wouldn’t try to stay at their long-time home.

Regardless, AFC Wimbledon are our rivals. I want Kingstonian to defeat AFC Wimbledon as much as possible and eventually surpass AFC Wimbledon in the football pyramid as the superior club.

Also, although the role of Chelsea in the Kingsmeadow debacle seems to be up for debate, Chelsea did not go out of their way to entertain a proposal for ground sharing from Kingstonian. Therefore, we will be tracking Chelsea’s progress every now and then, and hope to battle them in the Premier League eventually. A win over Chelsea would be a signature event for the Kingstonian club and a pronouncement that there may be new Kings of London in power.