No One Likes Us, We Don't Care: The Den Diaries

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Texasrangers13

3 years ago

2 months ago

15 Feb 2026 02:33:26

For those in the know, Millwall Football Club doesn’t need a marketing department to explain who they are. You feel it the second you hear the old terrace line: “No one likes us, we don’t care”, a defiant anthem born in the late 1970s and stitched into the club’s identity ever since.

Founded in 1885 as Millwall Rovers by workers on the Isle of Dogs, Millwall has spent most of its modern life grinding in England’s second and third tiers, promoted, relegated, promoted again, never chasing approval, only relevance. In the clubs 99 year Football League history, they've spent 92 years in either the second or third-tier. The breakthrough never coming, but always feeling like it wasn't that far away. Their home is The Den just south of the River Thames in south-east London, a ground that matches their reputation: compact, loud, and unforgiving to visitors.

As of the Summer of 2025 came, Millwall are an EFL Championship side, owned by Millwall Holdings and chaired by American James Berylson. Berylson became chairman in 2023 after his father unexpectedly passed. And with the 100th year in the Football League only a year away Berylson was anxious to make a change that would cement his fathers legacy while also creating a story worth following… How he did that… well let's just say he went against the grain.

And that’s where this story begins.

Because in our FM26 universe, the next chapter isn’t about abandoning Millwall’s edge, it’s about upgrading the engine underneath it. Ownership has committed to a data-driven approach that respects the club’s identity while modernizing how it recruits, develops, and competes. The plan is led by a relative fresh face to the soccer world, but not to elite sport: a leader with more than a decade working in Major League Baseball, including multiple years as a scout, a turn as the head of player development, and as an executive who has overseen academies across the world with performance pipelines where every decision must survive the scrutiny of evidence in some of the biggest markets in the sports world. He won't be alone, and most importantly will still surround himself with a number of men who have decades in the game.

Millwall’s question isn’t whether they can become something else. It’s whether they can become more, without losing the thing that made them Millwall in the first place. The Den will still demand fighters. The shirt will still mean siege mentality. But now, behind the noise, there’s a method. A model. A new way to build Lions.

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