AFC Wimbledon director of football Craig Cope and manager Johnnie Jackson had wanted to sign midfielder Marcus Browne for a while.
Browne, 27, had helped Oxford United get into the EFL Championship last season, but he was a free agent after leaving them in June. The team from League Two — the fourth tier of English football — knew they needed to put together an attractive proposition to persuade Browne to join them, so they put in a call to Indianapolis.
American bestselling author, YouTuber and philanthropist John Green, is best known for writing “The Fault in our Stars” (which was in the New York Times’ bestseller list for nearly 150 consecutive weeks) and also runs a YouTube channel for 3.84 million subscribers playing football video games such as FIFA with his brother, Hank.
But he also happens to love AFC Wimbledon. Over the years he’s helped the club financially with proceeds earned from his online streams. When Browne became available, they knew he would help.
Why would an author who has sold more than 50 million copies of his books and lives in the U.S. become a supporter of a League Two club in southwest London, you might ask? Well, for him, it’s simple. “It’s the greatest fairy tale in the history of sports, as far as I’m concerned,” Green tells ESPN. “I’m obsessed with the story.”
“I think there was a lot of pain when I joined the club,” says Cope, who joined as head of football operations in January 2023 and was promoted to director of football in November 2024. “But when we managed to bring in Joe [Lewis] last January, I felt there was a shift in the belief from the club and the fans and it was like: ‘We’re not taking this anymore. We are going to fight back.'”
One of Green’s favourite players is the aforementioned centre-back Lewis. He arrived on loan from Stockport County in June 2023 but, by the following January, the club were fearing he was going to be recalled.
“In the summer of 2023, John messaged and said if we ever needed some financial help for a player, get in touch. By the last week of December 2023, we thought Stockport were going to ask for Joe back,” Cope recalls. “I emailed him and said, this is coming to fruition, we might need some help to keep him. And he was on the phone straight away and like: ‘What do you need? What can we do?'”
On Jan. 10, 2024, Wimbledon signed Lewis on a permanent deal. Green adores watching Lewis, feeling a pang of nostalgia from Wimbledon’s “Crazy Gang” days whenever he puts in a bone-crunching tackle, even though he inadvertently masks Green’s logo.
“He hikes up his shorts like old school footballers from the ’70s, you know, really short shorts,” Green says. “And as such, you actually can’t see the sponsor logo. But I’m okay with it, I still like Joe Lewis a lot.”
But like his other dreams for his beloved Dons, it does beg the question as to which player he’d love the club to sign if they had a bottomless pit of cash. But even then, he mixes reality with fantasy football.
“The truth is, if I was granted a dream signing, I would sign a young player who we could sell on for a tremendous amount of money so we could pay off the debt on the stadium and have money to invest in the club for a generation,” Browne says. “So maybe I’d sign like a Cole Palmer type. We could have them for a bit and move them on for a £100m and find ourselves in a financially sustainable position for decades to come.”
Back to reality and AFC Wimbledon already secured two wins (one in the English FA Cup) and a draw against MK Dons this season, so that’s one goal ticked off. But they are aiming for promotion, taking them back to League One, and three steps away from the Premier League.
“Well, football fans are never happy, nor should we be,” Green says. “We should always be trying to see brighter horizons. I think in terms of my personal involvement, I want to continue supporting the club any way I can. Some of that means, you know, promotionally, some of it means in other ways.”
Green cites the need to balance financial sustainability and ambition as one challenge, while there is still debt to pay off from building the stadium. But that’s not coming at the expense of limiting the breadth of his dreams for where the club can go.
“There are big important headwinds to our success on the field,” Green says. “But I still think it’s realistic for a club of our size to be sustainable in League One and, long-term, there’s no reason why AFC Wimbledon can’t be right back where we belong: in the Premier League and competing for trophies like the [FA Cup] we won in 1988.”
