“I’m a bloke who has written an AFC Wimbledon book” – Erik Samuelson downplays efforts put into All Together Nowl

Erik Samuelson had many different  jobs at AFC Wimbledon, not all of them as official as the 12 years he spent as chief executive. Other roles included finance director, car park attendant, turnstile operator and even cleaning pigeon poo off stadium seats. But don’t dare call him an author, despite the publication of the excellent All Together Now – which chronicles the story of the Dons rebuilding after the original incarnation of the club was disgracefully ripped away from South London and transplanted in Milton Keynes.

Samuelson sent a copy to award-winning American writer John Green, who has enjoyed a stream of best-sellers. Green has been a sponsor of the  Dons since 2014.

“I said to him: ‘This is to a proper author from a bloke who has written a book’,” explained Samuelson. “What John does, or any other novelist, is they invent the characters, the locations and the events – I didn’t. They were all done for me – all the drama was there.

“I just had to find a way of recording them and giving different insight. I feel calling myself an author would be imposter syndrome. I suppose what I was saying, in effect [to Green], was ‘please be kind’.”

Samuelson is self-deprecating about his own role in the rise of AFC Wimbledon.

They were forced to reform in the Combined Counties and won five promotions in nine years. On November 3, 2020 they played their first match back at their newly-built Plough Lane stadium.

Samuelson was involved at the start of an exhilarating journey before retiring in April 2019. So who better to tell the story?
He interviewed 80 people and recorded 115 hours of audio.

Samuelson said: “There was a proposal to make a film about the club at one point. But I always felt it couldn’t possibly cover the story adequately, even though it was only going to go up to the league promotion. It would leave out a lot of people who played fundamentally important parts in what we did. That offended my sense of fair play.

“I’m not a great writer, but more importantly I’ve got a genuinely unique insight into what happened and unique access to all the papers and all the minutes.

“The reason I did so many interviews was to get another perspective on things and widen my knowledge.

“The [Conference] play-off final at the City of Manchester Stadium, as it was then called are pretty clearly embedded in my memory.

“There are other bits that had completely gone. Apparently there was a massive argument at The Dons Trust board one time, and I have no recollection of it at all.

“I asked interviewees about remembering something and they would say ‘oh yeah’ but you can tell their brain is ticking over thinking ‘what?’

“The best example I’ve got of this is Seb Brown. In the penalty shootout [against Luton in Manchester] he had a scrap of paper, torn out of a pocket notebook, with five names [of opposition spot-kick takers] on it but only two were on the pitch. I said: ‘Eight years ago Seb when you told that story there were four names on there and only one on the pitch’.

“He had absolutely no motive to change it and genuinely believed what he was telling me. He had to go and find the paper in his dad’s loft to make sure the story of eight years ago was right.

“What it showed to me in the starkest terms was that memories change and they get altered inadvertently, so therefore you have to go back and check other sources, either documents or people.”

Nearly every Dons manager is quoted in the book – which Samuelson dedicated to his wife Eileen – as well as the key playing protagonists.

But unsurprisingly the focus is also on the people who refused to just accept one of English football’s great injustices. Kris Stewart, Marc Jones, Trevor Williams and Ivor Heller, the long-serving commercial director, founded AFC Wimbledon. The rest is glorious history.

Williams was one of Samuelson’s favourite chats, along with Dave Anderson and Simon Bassey, who played for the club and then moved into the first-team coaching set-up.

“One of the reasons Dave made such an impact was he was one of the early ones and I was able to do it face to face,” explained Samuelson, who had to deal with the lockdown limitations of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Most of the others were done on the phone and Zoom, once I got to grips with it. But it is nowhere near as good as having someone in the room, taking a break for a cup of tea and then gossiping over the kettle and saying ‘that was an interesting point – let’s put it in’.

“It’s why I talk about them as conversations rather than interviews. Dave was great fun.

“Trevor was another of the most enjoyable ones, because he was a founder – most people don’t remember that. But he was – and he has been right on the inside. He was originally club secretary but now he is kitman. If you need anything helpful doing then he is your man.

“He was in the dressing room for most of those years and some of the best stories came from him – along with one or two that I can’t print.

“Simon Bassey is wickedly funny but also has a good, astute eye for the football aspect of it.

“Others were very informative, but those three were the most fun.”

That doesn’t mean to say that chronicling the rise of the Dons was always easy. Samuelson admits that a deadline for completion was missed and that he also paused for three or four weeks when three-quarters of the way through it.

“One of the things I promised myself when I retired was that I was going to read the newspaper every day before I did anything,” he said. “So I’d normally start at half past nine or 10. I think it was Stephen King who said something like he would write from eight until one every day, have a long coffee lunch and then from three until five would re-read everything he had done and often tear it up. He was pretty disciplined.

“I’d start at 10 and by 20 past it would be time for a cup of tea. About quarter to 11 it would be ‘let’s check the news’. At 11 it would be ‘oh bloody hell there’s a test match on’. I am incredibly easily distracted.

“There were days I wrote a lot, just because some chapters are easy to write. Others you have to write and then rewrite and rewrite. A good quote of an old colleague of mine is ‘better is the enemy of the good’. In other words, leave it alone – it is good enough.

“Life at the football club and the book have one thing in common – they got more serious as time went on. Because for the football club there is a bigger risk of losing something the higher up you get. It’s just huge fun in non-league, great success. Then, hang on, we might get relegated out of the league. That would be a disaster. So it wasn’t so much fun to write. You are enjoying writing about all the sendings off at Chessington. It got harder and it got slower.”

Samuelson was a central figure at AFC Wimbledon for so long. And then, abruptly, he wasn’t.

“I needed to give Joe [Palmer, who succeeded Samuelson] time to prepare for next season as he would have to deliver it, which is why I timed it when I did. If your financial year starts on July 1, you want your budget agreed before then.

“That left him in charge and free to do other things he was recruited to do, to commercialise the stadium. That sounds almost like a criticism – it isn’t. He was here to make it more effective as a business.

“I said to him and Mark Davis, who was then the chair of the trust, and a few others ‘if you want any help then I’ll be glad to – but you have to ask. I’m not going to come and impose myself’. You have to let go. One of the things which is saddest is when people hang around waiting to be asked. I didn’t want to be sat at the back of the stand, arms folded and metaphorically tutting at what was happening now.

“My wife says I’m quite good at letting go of things. I put some energy into being the chair. When you retire it is important to have something to do. The book was there, plus I do the accounts for my son’s business, so I keep busy.

“Pointedly I stayed away from showing up at the club. I didn’t think that would help anybody.”

Samuelson never got paid while he worked for Wimbledon.

“The then chair of the trust said, quite rightly, that I should have a contract – to hold me accountable. For any contract to be legally valid there has to be some exchange of value. Normally with a peppercorn rent that is a pound.

“So he said a pound and I replied: ‘Make it sound posh – how about a guinea?’. Yeah, fine. But who is going to pay me that? I never claimed it.

“What did happen is Iain McNay, one of the sponsors, presented me at one of the home games with a real guinea. It was a lovely gesture and a complete surprise.  But no, I never got paid. So what do they owe me, 12 years at a guinea a year? [That’s] £12.60, I don’t think I’ll go searching for that.

“I’m not wealthy. I’m certainly a lot less affluent than I was when I started working for nothing. But we live quiet lives, Eileen and I. For example, neither of us drinks. We don’t go out partying. We’ve got my pension, her pension and now the state pension to live on which makes us comfortable. Why would I be taking money out of the club when it could be used to be spent on improving it, getting in someone else or signing a player? All the time I was there I bought my own season ticket. I don’t like freebies. I didn’t need to, so I felt I should pay.”

Samuelson boiled down the Dons journey to 400 pages – not including an appendix. But he admits that he gave a “really naff” answer when another journalist had asked for his best moment.  Irritated that he hadn’t expected the question and formulated an answer, Samuelson later emailed them back.

“The best moment is yet to come,” he said. “When the teams walk out for the first competitive game at Plough Lane, that will be the best moment. That will be the time when all the people who did what they did – and I hope I mentioned a lot of them in my book – can sit there and quietly be pleased with their contribution.

“Also it is worth remembering that if it wasn’t for the four founders – and that’s not me, it is Kris Stewart, Marc Jones, Trevor Williams and Ivor Heller – none of that would have happened. No stadium and no team. All the people employed there, directly and indirectly, wouldn’t be in employment. They are all standing on the shoulders of those four guys.

“That is what I’d be thinking when the teams come out.”

All Together Now (Pitch Publishing) is out now.