There are Football Manager saves where you win promotion year after year until you reach the top. A group of English friends decided to do it for real, with their own club, founded from scratch.
A tantrum that became a club
In September 1999, Wimbledon were going through a serious crisis, with the club’s owners considering moving it to another city, which eventually happened years later. Fed up with the situation, Marc White, a fanatical supporter, decided to spend his Saturdays differently. “I thought: why not start something with my mates and have a good laugh? That is how Dorking Wanderers was born,” he told The Guardian.
There were fourteen friends, each paying £50 to rent a council pitch. “For Saturday amateur football in England, any level will do. And that is how it all started,” recalls White, now the club’s chairman and director.
Twelve promotions later
What started as a joke kept growing. Title after title in the district leagues, then in the West Sussex leagues, the Sussex County League and the Isthmian League, Dorking Wanderers climbed the English football pyramid at a pace none of the founders expected.
In 2007, with real sponsorship and income coming in, they built their own stadium, Meadowbank, which now holds around three thousand fans. “We got 11 promotions in 19 years, a record in Britain. It is like real-life Football Manager,” Marc White summed up. In the 2021/22 season, they finished second in the National League South and went up via the play-offs to the National League, the fifth tier of English football. In total, the club has now racked up twelve promotions since its founding.
The growth came step by step: “When we got our first promotion, we had to put a rope around the pitch, a ‘protective barrier’ between fans and players. Then came the floodlights, the dugouts, the seats. Today we have a stadium for three thousand people,” White said, laughing.
From a joke between friends to a case study
The club’s first real signing was Jason Prior, bought from Havant for £15,000. “We needed a real striker, a finisher, and our sponsors agreed to pay for it. Was it worth it? Absolutely,” White said. Today the club has a reserve team and a football school with 1,150 children enrolled, from age 4, in the small town of Dorking, home to around 12,000 people. “When I drive through town, I see parents and kids wearing the team’s shirt. The club has become the community’s meeting point,” he celebrated.
A journey now held up as an example of how passion and serious management can turn a neighborhood club into a recognized name in English football, a club that did not even exist until a group of friends decided to create it.
