If you’ve been playing the Yakuza Remastered Collection recently you will have noticed the character Koji who is the young boy who loves sport and is always seen wearing a football/soccer shirt. The team on the shirt is AFC Wimbledon which seemed a very strange choice at the time since the team were in the 5th tier of English football when the game released back in 2009. The Yakuza series has a history with sport and has even included sportsman like Paul Lim who is a darts player from Singapore in Yakuza 6.

As a football fan playing Yakuza 3 in 2010 (when the game was released outside of Japan) this stuck as strange to me and I remember looking into why AFC Wimbledon of all teams was featured and finding no answers. The answer it turn’s out is actually very simple.

The story start’s back in the early 2000’s, Milton Keynes was one of the largest town’s in England that didn’t have it’s own professional football team with many businessmen seeing it as an opportunity. The idea of moving a team from one location to another is a very common occurrence in the United States with their sports teams but is a very unpopular idea in the rest of the world.

Wimbledon had been struggling for a few years on and off the pitch and after years in the Premier League playing the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool and even winning the FA Cup Wimbledon started to fall down the leagues and ran into financial problems losing as much as £6 million a year. They had also lost their stadium and had been playing at the nearby Selhurst Park which was owned by Crystal Palace for over 10 years while they tried to find a new home.

Pete Winkelman was a businessman who was trying to build a 30,000 capacity stadium in Milton Keynes along with shops such as IKEA and ASDA (The UK branch of Walmart). With no big teams in the area to fill the stadium he looked elsewhere to try and convince a club to move to Milton Keynes so he could justify the large stadium being built since it would be larger then some Premier League stadiums. Since Wimbledon was in freefall Winkelman offered to move the team to Milton Keynes promising that it would save the team and help them get back to where they once was. That offer was accepted by everyone apart from the most important people, the fans. Football in the UK is a lot more then just supporting a team, each team has it’s own unique ties to the local community and that isn’t something you can just move from one town to another. Most Wimbledon fans refused to make the journey which was almost 100 miles to see their team play in Milton Keynes. Eventually the team had it’s name changed to MK Dons and is no longer associated with the old Wimbledon team.

After the move the fans of Wimbledon decided to make their own team called AFC Wimbledon in 2002 and started at the bottom of the football pyramid and work their way back up. With football fan’s of every team siding with the Wimbledon fans and feeling they was very badly treated support for the new team was high with many people rooting for them to do well. The first sponsor of AFC Wimbledon was Sports Interactive the creator’s of the Championship Manager and Football Manager series and they have continued to sponsor the team every year since. Sports Interactive was bought by SEGA in 2006 and the Football Manager series remains very popular.

Sega have previously and continue to sponsor many football teams but it’s cool to see that a smaller team like AFC Wimbledon get a nod in their non football related games.

What are the best Easter Egg’s you’ve found in the games? Share with us at the Tojo Dojo Forum

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