Luton Town’s extraordinary ‘resurrection’

Agony and ecstasy; despair and jubilation. No period in the sporting calendar brings with it such a dramatic clash of emotions as the end of the football season. And where despair is concerned, few clubs could have felt it as abjectly this weekend as Leicester City, said James Gheerbrant in The Times. Seven years ago, the “feisty Midlands club wrote the great fairy tale of the Premier League era”, when they won it after starting the season as 5,000/1 outsiders. And in their 2-1 victory over West Ham United on Sunday, they “showed the quality of a side who should have stayed up, comfortably”. But “this season has been a mess” of bad management and poor recruitment. And so it was that their victory over West Ham was not enough. Everton’s 1-0 win over Bournemouth meant that they survived at the expense of the Foxes, who, along with Southampton and Leeds, have now been relegated to the Championship.

But Leicester’s misery was Luton Town’s joy. After 31 years out of the top flight, the club joined Burnley and Sheffield United in being promoted to the Premiership, after beating Coventry in the Championship play-off final at Wembley on Saturday. The match got off to a terrible start for Luton, said Matt Barlow in The Mail on Sunday: shortly after kick-off, captain Tom Lockyer collapsed on the pitch and was rushed to hospital. It was 1-1 at full time so it went down to a penalty shoot-out, only settled – after 11 consecutive successful spot-kicks – when Coventry’s Fankaty Dabo skied his effort into the stands.

To get an idea of the extraordinary feat achieved by Luton, consider the career of Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu, said Tom Allnutt in The Times. When he joined the club in 2013, it was languishing in the fifth-tier Conference (now National) League, losing to the likes of Braintree and Halifax Town. Back then, the team trained on a public field – sessions regularly interrupted by dog walkers. Mpanzu’s first-team debut, away to Staines Town, was witnessed by just 621 people. Next season, the 29-year-old midfielder, the first player in English football history to climb from non-league to the top division with the same club, will be playing in rather grander venues.

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Luton’s “resurrection” over the past decade has challenged “the assumptions of the modern game”, said Jim White in The Daily Telegraph. Usually, when teams rise that fast, it’s with the boost of “financial doping”. Yet Luton has never had a “sugar daddy”. On the contrary, the club’s descent to non-league status was the product of decades of financial mismanagement by a succession of “asset-stripping owners”. A consortium of local businessmen took over in 2009 determined that such a situation should never recur. They put stringent financial controls in place and stuck to them. Luton secured promotion despite having one of the lowest playing budgets in the Championship – testament to the shrewd oversight of manager Rob Edwards.

The Championship play-off final has been dubbed the “richest game in football”, said Luke Baker in The Independent. Ahead of the 2020 play-off final, Deloitte calculated that victory would bring somewhere between £135m and £265m to the winning club (depending on whether they stayed up or not). With serious money flooding into Luton’s coffers, there’s one thing they urgently need to do, said Ben Fisher in The Guardian: spend on the “creaking but charismatic” Kenilworth Road stadium. The “Kenny” has a capacity of a mere 10,356, making it the smallest stadium in Premier League history. Even the club’s chief executive, Gary Sweet, has joked about Erling Haaland arriving at its “s**t entrance”.

Just to make it compliant with Premier League regulations, Luton will need to spend at least £10m in the off-season, installing extra TV camera positions, upgrading floodlights, and rebuilding a portion of the stands. And promotion may well accelerate construction of a larger stadium in the town’s centre, with a capacity of around 20,000. But in the meantime, the club’s fans and players are cherishing the memory of Saturday’s victory, said Matt Barlow. Asked how he and his teammates would celebrate that night, a grinning Mpanzu replied: “Tonight? Celebrations Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. We’re going to enjoy this one.”