WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED FOREWORD BY AFCW SUPERFAN AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, JOHN GREEN
I first met Ivor Heller in 2014 because I had an idea: What if I used money I made from streaming videogames online to sponsor an actual, real-life football team? Ivor may not have understood the economics of YouTube livestreaming, but he needed a back-of-shorts sponsor for AFC Wimbledon, whose rebirth and rise Ivor has fuelled for now 25 years.

Ivor is, above all else, an enthusiast. His enthusiasm for AFC Wimbledon is so infectious that I’ve been that back of shorts sponsor for twelve seasons. He loves Wimbledon so much that he makes you love Wimbledon, makes the world love Wimbledon.

Some of us might’ve responded with despair or hopelessness to having our football club wrested away by the English football authorities.

But Ivor is allergic to despair. He and others instead responded with hope: Maybe the FA would say it wasn’t “in the wider interests” of English football to have a football club in Wimbledon, but Ivor and his band of merry football fans would go on to prove the FA wrong again and again and again.

Every other Saturday, around 8,000 people gather in a stadium built by the fans of AFC Wimbledon–a stadium that the authorities and rich football investors thought was impossible.

They watch professional football played by a team that, again, the authorities and rich football investors thought was impossible. And this dream, this wonder, would’ve been impossible without Ivor and the other cofounders of the football club that means so much to me and to many. He literally made his dreams come true.

But Ivor has spent his life proving people wrong. He has prevailed where others said it was impossible over and over again, and both his Wimbledon story and his life story are reminders to me that hope is always the correct response to the miracle of consciousness.

His book will make you believe in the impossible again, the way you did when you were a kid, the way we all still should.