“The concept was really, really strong,” said Higgins, now chairman of League of Ireland side Sligo Rovers.<\/p>\n
“Jack Charlton’s Irish team was in his heyday, and coming off Italia ’90 and USA ’94, you’d have had a mini-international side playing in Dublin every other week. <\/p>\n
“I believe it would have transformed soccer on the island, but they [the FAI] were looking down too narrow a pipe. <\/p>\n
“And look at what’s happened since – rugby and the GAA have eaten our lunch and they get the money for TV and sponsorship.<\/p>\n
“Soccer just didn’t have the vision to do something transformative.”<\/p>\n
In the end, it was a moot point. After 18 months of talks, the line to Hammam went dead. Calls went unanswered, correspondence unreturned.<\/p>\n
Higgins, who still has the unsigned contract among his files, was walking through an airport the next year when he looked up at a television screen to see news that Hammam had sold 80% of the club to Bjorn Rune Gjelsten and Kjell Inge Rokke for \u00a326m, more than four times their own bid. <\/p>\n
A shopping centre now sits where the Premier League stadium was to be built.<\/p>\n
Dublin would not get its team, but nor would Wimbledon keep theirs with the club ultimately moved to Milton Keynes in 2004.<\/p>\n
In the community left behind, AFC Wimbledon were born, starting life in the ninth tier of English football that same year with Heller among four co-founders. <\/p>\n
Three decades on from those first murmurs of a move to Dublin, the reclaimed club are a League One side and since returned to their spiritual home of Plough Lane.<\/p>\n
“You talk about the FA Cup, league finishes, cup semi-finals, but for me what they’ve done, that’s the biggest achievement in the history of the football club,” said Cunningham.<\/p>\n
“To be knocked for six, to go careening down the leagues, and come back, it’s a success every time they take the pitch. Good luck to them.<\/p>\n
“The Dublin thing? It’s a bit of nostalgia now, maybe a bit of sadness at a missed opportunity.<\/p>\n
“People would be laughing now but it’s something that would have worked, no doubt about it. Absolutely, people would have rowed in behind it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“The concept was really, really strong,” said Higgins, now chairman of League of Ireland side Sligo Rovers. “Jack…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-595841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}