Anyone out there remember the great white elephant that was Wimbledon for Dublin? And what about the sequel that had us all rushing back for more, Wimbledon for Belfast? The premise was a simple one, but, hey, those involved clearly felt they were dealing with simple people. Neither city has a Premiership football team, so why don't we just parachute one in, knock up a stadium on a green-field site and watch the crowds and the television revenue come rolling in?

Four years on it still looks like the preposterous and disastrously ill-conceived notion it clearly was, but at the time the idea of putting together a football franchise got a great number of people very excited indeed. Even now it is difficult to piece together just how close the entire project came to fruition but the money men were clearly hovering around and those who circled the wagons in opposition to the plans evidently took them seriously.

Enthusiasm for the move fizzled out after the initial wave of hype and euphoria but if you happened to pick up a newspaper last week you would have seen that Wimbledon are at it again. No longer the attractive Premiership project they once were, the club finds itself still homeless and marooned in the English First Division. Former chairman Sam Hamman has long departed the scene and the new owners have failed to transform Wimbledon into a side capable of returning to the sanctuary of the Premiership.

Having missed out on the play-offs, the money men's plans became clear last week as their latest attempt to destroy the very fabric of the club they own and control leaked out.

Dissatisfied with financial affairs as they stood, the bright idea was that Wimbledon should merge with Queen's Park Rangers, another London club and one which has just been relegated to the Second Division, to form a totally new footballing operation. Although this idea has since been "officially" shelved by both clubs, as far as the Wimbledon chairman was concerned, it all seemed to make perfect sense. "Our initial view," Charles Koppel said, "is that, in the current financial environment for football outside the Premier League, the idea could have merit and may be worth exploring further."

Now while this might be the sort of comment you would expect to read from some managing director or other on the financial pages, it sits very uneasily with the whys and wherefores of running a football club. Nothing that Charles Koppel was reported as saying made any reference to the supporters of either Wimbledon or Rangers. The extent to which they might feel cheated and betrayed at the sight of their football team disappearing as an independent entity and becoming part of some unholy alliance with another rival club did not appear to have entered his thinking. The arrogance of it all is breathtaking.

The parallels between the attempts to relocate Wimbledon to Dublin or Belfast a few years ago and the efforts to merge with Queen's Park Rangers are obvious. Both schemes are born of the same blatant disregard for both the history of the club and the emotional investment that successive generations of supporters have made.

For them the integrity and the traditions of Wimbledon football club come much higher up the pecking order than profit and loss accounts and maximising revenue. That is as it should be but in the shape of a decade those same supporters have had to face up to two different attempts to destroy their club.

The first relocation plan was faced down and the Wimbledon Independent Supporters' Association made it clear that it now "unequivocally opposes the merger of two separate identities, families, supporters and histories". In that they deserve the support of everyone who professes to care about sport and the people who engage with it.

ALL of this is a lot nearer to home than many might like to think. We may never know how close either the FAI or the IFA here in the north came to giving the idea of an English Premiership club within their boundaries serious consideration. Nor is there any reason to imagine that the same idea will not rear its head at some point in the future.

The allure of a strong economy in the Republic and a society on the other side of the border which is going through a process of sustained regeneration may be too much for the franchises to resist. The success so far of the great Belfast ice hockey experiment will give encouragement to those who have up until now had their doubts and reservations. If ice hockey can work, they might well now be asking themselves, why not basketball and, slightly further down the line, European level football? In the end money will do all the talking and in the current climate the temptation will always be there.

The spectre of a new Belfast-based football franchise reappears from time to time and is generally met with implacable opposition from the IFA, which would see its own kingdom contract and decrease in influence overnight. That alone is not enough to rule the franchise idea out of order but there are also other, more pertinent considerations.

Money and time would only be invested here in a franchise if those behind it felt confident of a swift and worthwhile return on what they had put in. A compliant government, one which was prepared to divert public money into any proposed scheme, would also be regarded as a distinct advantage.

But it is more than likely that those money men who got involved would be driven by the same basic considerations as the type of people who control Wimbledon or Queen's Park Rangers. Those are the sort of people we would have to get into bed with if all this talk of franchises and European football is ever to be more than a pipe dream. The stakes are high but the risks appear even greater. Just ask the supporters at Wimbledon or Queen's Park Rangers.