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."
Green first read about AFC Wimbledon on Reddit. He learned how Wimbledon FC were plucked away from their south London home and moved 50 miles north to Milton Keynes in 2003. Their identity was scrubbed out, and the club renamed Milton Keynes Dons, or MK Dons, a year later.
He read about how AFC Wimbledon had already risen from the ashes in 2002 as a phoenix club, owned by the supporters who sacrificed time and money to get their team off the ground in the ninth tier.
"I fell in love with the way the club is run; the fact no matter how much money you put into the club, everybody gets the same one vote in the club's leadership through the Don's Trust," Green says. "I became a member, went to my first game, and it all unfurled from there."
Green was aghast at how an English Football Association commission at the time described having a football club in Wimbledon as "not in the wider interests of the game" and greenlit the Milton Keynes move.
"I think what happened to the club is one of the worst things in the history of English football, but the way the community has shown resilience ever since is a huge inspiration to me," he says.
As his love for AFC Wimbledon grew, Green looked at other ways to contribute. He learnt how volunteers would sometimes spend sub-zero nights at their ground, moving the heaters every hour to ensure the pitch wouldn't freeze. Of course that was an impossible commute from his home in Indianapolis, so he looked at other avenues.
"Back then, I used to livestream FIFA on YouTube, and I used the from advertising revenue from there to sponsor the club," he adds. "I had this idea it would be really funny if, when I was playing FIFA, I could see my own logo on the back of the shorts.
"My brother and I, and our families, have been the back-of-shorts sponsor for the last 12 years, in that coveted space between left thigh and buttock on the uniform any commercial enterprise would kill for."
The money spent on putting DFTBA (Don't Forget to be Awesome) on the shorts was a little more than his usual £30 annual Trust membership.
"That turned out to be the beginning of something much larger," he says. "You fall in love, and you do crazy things."
Plough Lane is where the Wimbledon story began in 1912 and where they played through to 1991. When Wimbledon couldn't keep up with new safety requirements, they had to move and shared a ground with Crystal Palace, through to the Milton Keynes relocation, but Plough Lane was their spiritual home.
For the first 18 years after forming, AFC Wimbledon played at Kingsmeadow -- at the time the home of fellow non-league team Kingstonian but now used by Chelsea's women's team -- before in November 2020 returning to a new stadium on Plough Lane. Just yards from the site of their former ground, which had been replaced by a housing development, it came at a cost of £30m or so.
"Yeah, that was definitely a tough conversation with the family about whether or not we were going to be able to invest in the club in a bigger way," Green says. "75% of AFC Wimbledon is owned by the Don's Trust and the remaining 25% is available for private investors.
"When the opportunity came to invest in a bigger way in the club through the development of Plough Lane, I wanted to take that opportunity because it's an important part of my life. The first time I walked into Plough Lane, I burst into tears because it's such a beautiful stadium and I know up close how hard and for how long so many people worked to make that happen."
Green has a season ticket there, and tries to get to five home matches a season.
"Each time, it feels magical to me, as I'm with 8,000 people whose love is oriented in the same direction as mine," he says.
Green has also helped with other parts of the club.
"John is innovative and because of where he's been and different experiences he's had, he's helped with the growth side of the club," says Cope, AFC Wimbledon's director of football. "He's helped me since I've been here in the last two years, but obviously prior to that, he has the sponsorship, he helped the women's team out, helped us to get back to Plough Lane and gave us a platform to reach markets which we couldn't previously reach."
All the while, Green has seen them go from the ninth tier and the Combined Counties League Premier Division to League One in 2016, before they dropped back to League Two at the end of the 2021-22 season. The club now sit fourth in League Two, comfortably in the promotion mix with the top three clubs moving up to League One automatically.
January has habitually been a tough month for Wimbledon. In the winter transfer window in 2022 they allowed Ollie Palmer to move to Wrexham and were relegated. A season on -- in Cope's first transfer window in 2022-23 -- they lost Ayoub Assal to Al Wakrah, Jack Rudoni to Huddersfield Town and subsequently finished 21st. But they are starting to turn that tide, and part of that is thanks to Green's financial aid.
"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."
Wimbledon wanted to add to their attacking options in this window, so they looked at Browne. Green was streaming online at the time when he reached a goal he'd set for bolstering the playing budget. He phoned up Cope in front of the thousands watched him playing FIFA.
"I told Craig I'd like to put in a little bit extra [money] in for the push toward promotion," Green says.
Cope remembers the call: "I was conscious not to swear as I knew he was live, but he said: 'Let me know when, when you require those funds.'
"We'd identified Browne as a player we wanted."
Green spoke to Browne on the day he signed for the club: Jan. 14, 2025.
"I was trying to explain to [Browne] the circumstances leading to this and he got it right away. He also used to stream on Twitch so he understands that world," Green says. "I actually tried to sign Marcus Browne on Football Manager and he wouldn't join us. So I think Craig did an absolute masterclass to get him here."
By his own admission, Green stays firmly on the outside of the tent when it comes to talent identification and negotiations.
"I have to be sure when call goes in and John's willing to part with some of his finances to help the club he knows it's going towards something that can really make a difference," Cope says. "Myself and the manager won't spend money for the sake of spending money. We're very conscious of where this club's been, what makes it so special and achieving the impossible at a club like this. The word 'impossible' doesn't exist around Wimbledon."
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."