It’s all good and well talking about upping sticks to another county while there are wealthy investors propping the club up, but given they’re here for the Oxford name and the prospect of a property development deal, moving the club to Buckinghamshire means they’d continue to bankroll us for... what? What’s in it for them at that point, while we play to half the amount of people we normally do, because that’s simply what happens when a club moves for even a single season let alone many? Why would they put their hands in their pockets even further to watch us play to 3/4k in Stadium MK? And who says both the FA and EFL would even grant the permission to begin with? They’re not going to want to have another Coventry, or to open the door to every club that gets the hump with their circumstances just moving to wherever the hell they fancy for an unspecified period of time. At the very least the authorities would want to know what the plan is to move beyond the situation, and to approve a rigid timescale to that. One timer stops, another one starts. If we simply turned around and went, “No real plan, just going to stay here indefinitely until something comes up closer to home, maybe, at some sort of point, ish” then we would be expelled from the league and stripped of the Oxford name.
We already had a few dunderheads living out their hard man fantasies with the encouragement of the club 2/3 years back, running around with their shirts off and declaring we were going to stick it to Kassam once and for all by walking out unless he gave us a better deal. Then reality bit down and the implications became clear, not just legally and financially but constitutionally in terms of the club being allowed to retain its place in the league, and the necks were wound in just as quickly as the shrivelled willies were brandished.
The club has only ever had two choices:
1) Live as peacefully as possible with the current situation while trying to secure the existing stadium for redevelopment, OR while trying to secure an alternative site for a new stadium to move to.
2) Start a Phoenix club and try to ground share with Oxford City or the like.
That’s it. Moving Oxford United to Milton Keynes, or Wycombe, or Northampton, or anywhere else within 40/50 miles with absolutely no plan of how or when to get out of there, is not an option. You might get away with a season or two in one of those places while a new stadium is completed, like when Spurs played at Wembley during the rebuilding of WHL, but that’s your lot. Otherwise you’re just running towards the barrel of a gun while holding a slingshot. It might make you feel good but it goes black pretty quickly.