Dean Lewington made his first professional appearance as an 18-year-old in April 2003, a few months before the launch of MySpace and 938 games later (814 in the league) he is preparing for the League Two playoffs, as driven and professional as ever. Lewington, who turns 40 in a fortnight and remembers the days when away games meant the team bus stopping at Trowell services on the M1 to stock up on beers for the journey home, is not the type to follow social media trends. “I had a MySpace page, a very bad one … that was probably where I peaked,” the MK Dons captain says laughing.
Little did Lewington think when Wimbledon visited Sheffield Wednesday in Division One, the old second tier, that it would represent the first of his 22 seasons in the game while he is now expected to sign a new contract to carry on playing next season.
Last year, after his 771st league appearance for MK Dons – the club founded in 2004 after Wimbledon were relocated to Buckinghamshire – he surpassed John Trollope’s long-standing record for Swindon Town for the most league appearances for a single club. Before victory at Swindon in February, Lewington met the man whose record he eclipsed. “We got a knock on the changing-room door and he was outside,” the defender says. “It was a really nice moment. He said: ‘I never thought someone would beat it.’”
Lewington is fourth on the list of all-time English league appearances but walk into his house in Surrey and, he says, you would never know he has had an outstanding career in the game. Lewington is such a reluctant record-breaker, the running joke at the club is that there are unwanted mementos toasting various landmark achievements dotted around the stadium. Not fussed about a commemorative shirt to mark his 600th appearance, in 2019, it remains in the car boot of a former employee.
“I keep a shirt from every season, including some of the away ones, so I have about 30 in the loft,” he says. “Apart from that, any trophies are at mum and dad’s. I was never interested in swapping shirts; when we played Chelsea, my mate is a Chelsea fan so asked me to get one and I swapped with Willian. But it wasn’t for myself, I gave it away straight away.”
He is self-deprecating and down to earth but a fiercely-competitive character. Aaron Wilbraham, a former teammate and friend, describes him, affectionately, as the world’s worst loser. Pace has never been Lewington’s forte but he has long been a master when it comes to positioning, a mind-reader of sorts.
Still, that hasn’t stopped opponents identifying him as a perceived weak link on the basis of the mileage in his legs. “I know speaking to managers and coaches after games, they have said they made a point of saying: ‘He’s X years old, he’s not as quick as he was.’ If they have targeted it, it’s not really come off for them.”
Lewington’s father, Ray, the former England assistant manager who retired this year after leaving Crystal Palace with Roy Hodgson, helped him out on the couple of occasions he has been placed in caretaker charge of the club. The second time, in December 2022, not everyone realised his dad was more than qualified to do so. “I introduced him as just my dad, because I thought everyone knew. Halfway through the session [striker] Matty Dennis came up to me and said: ‘Your dad knows his stuff, doesn’t he? I thought he was a taxi driver or something.’”
In many ways, Lewington is a great survivor given the churn of players across the pyramid. Incredibly, the only MK Dons manager not to play Dean Lewington? Lewington himself. He is also the only player to wear their No 3 shirt, leading supporters to wonder whether, one day, the club will retire it. “It’s very American, isn’t it?” He recoils at the suggestion of a statue being erected in his honour, in check with his easy-going, no-frills personality. “I try and live as simple a life as I can. No ego, nothing I don’t need. Mum and dad are very much like that – they came from nothing, never bought into the cars, the watches.”
In the goldfish bowl of the game, has he always resisted the temptation to be flash? “When you’re 19, 20, it does creep in a little bit because you’re a young lad at the age, you’ve got a bit of money, that’s what you do. By 22, 23, I realised that wasn’t really me. I had like a 3-litre [Audi] A5, insurance was like £4,000, something stupid, every service cost 800 quid and you think: ‘Not too sure about this.’ I realised quite early on that it doesn’t buy you happiness you maybe think it does.” Now he drives a Suzuki, who have a partnership with the club.
There are weekly reminders of quite how long Lewington has been in the business. He recalls the “Ex-Files” feature in the matchday programme that used to spotlight former players, every one of whom he has played alongside. Then there are the blank looks he gets from teenage teammates when he tells how Rotherham have not always played at the New York Stadium or of Peter Ndlovu’s brilliance for Coventry. “They have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.
Perhaps the most the striking example arrived last August, when MK Dons hosted Chelsea’s Under-21s in the EFL Trophy and he faced a 16-year-old Kiano Dyer. It was not just the 23-year age gap but the fact Lewington won the League Two title in 2008 with Dyer’s father, Lloyd, who two years earlier missed an FA Cup first-round replay victory over Farsley Athletic, in which Lewington played, because of the birth of his son. “I walked past him in the warmup and I was like: ‘Hang on, that’s Lloydy’s boy!’ It is amazing how things go full circle.”
Lewington says never missing training is the closest thing to a secret behind his remarkable longevity. “As I’ve got older, managers will say have a day off or if the rest of the lads are having one, you have two, or don’t always do the afternoon sessions. But I found that more of a hindrance.”
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Mike Williamson, the 40-year-old who took charge in October after impressing in his first management job at Gateshead, puts it succinctly. “He’s a phenomenon, isn’t he? I could be standing here in 10 years and he’ll probably still be here”.
The only surprise at training, as the vice-captain, Alex Gilbey, testifies afterwards is that Lewington wears white boots, recalling the time, to the shock of his teammates, he wore them straight out of the box at Barrow. Unsurprisingly, there is no extravagant 40th bash on the horizon – but for good reason. The League Two playoff final is on 19 May, the day after Lewington’s birthday, and if MK Dons prevail against Crawley over two legs, the first of which is on Monday in Sussex, they will reach the Wembley finale. Promotion, he says, “would be a nice present.”
He knows it would be foolish not to give thought to the future. He began compiling opposition analysis under former manager Liam Manning, now of Bristol City, and recently completed his Uefa B licence. He has visited Russell Martin, another former manager, to watch training at Southampton, as well as his brother, Craig, the manager of ninth-tier Cobham. For now, however, he is focused on playing.
“I’ve been very appreciative of all of the different managers trying to help and encourage me to push me in different directions. But every time I’ve had to pull back a little bit because I want to be seen as a player. I don’t want it to be: ‘Dean, you’re not playing Saturday, but would you mind playing on Tuesday?’” Because at that point? “You’re done,” he replies.
Lewington has straddled different eras of the game, having tasted the back end of the Crazy Gang culture at Wimbledon when the team played cards on the bus and pranks translated to “a lot of nudity”. What has been the most noticeable shift on the pitch? “Physical contact,” he says. “Your first tackle was always free … you could basically do whatever you wanted with the first tackle, and the ref would just say: ‘Well, it’s your first one, so that’s OK.’ When I started if it was a goal-kick there would be 20 players in one 20-yard little square, the keeper would boom it downfield, and the ball would be in the air for the next five minutes.”
Times have changed – Diet Coke has replaced beer en route home from an away win, for starters – but Lewington is determined to be judged now just as when he was the ginger-haired teenage full-back breaking through the youth team at Wimbledon. “If I’m playing rubbish, I’m playing rubbish, I don’t deserve to play, it shouldn’t be: ‘You’re playing rubbish and you’re 39,’” he says.
“If I’m playing well and I’m 41, who cares? If I’m not up to the level or people don’t think I deserve to be playing, that’s fine, but it should be based on my performance, not my age. When that happens, I suppose you’ll know and it will be time to go.”