Luton Town recover from dark days to be within reach of Premier League dream

Andy Mitten visits a club once on the brink of extinction to discover how, on a tight budget and with a crumbling stadium, it has managed to challenge for promotion from the Championship

Carlton Morris, left, scored 20 goals this season - the third-most in the Championship - to help Luton into the play-offs. PA

March 2014: I’ve just arrived in Tehran to interview Carlos Queiroz, Iran’s manager. Fixing a trip to Iran as a British journalist is extremely complicated, even with the help of a popular national team manager.

It took six months and, with no UK embassy, a three-day trip to Dublin to wait for a visa which increased in price four times. It involved calls from Iran from security people cursing because “your government has just refused Iranians visas, so why should we give you a visa?”

Not without reason, I was exceptionally nervous when I landed. I’d been told that I would be met and watched for days.

I handed my passport to the passport official.

“British journalist,” he said as information came up on his computer. “Football.”

I nodded. He looked up and asked: “Do you know the Luton Town?”

Iran would never be a problem from that moment. Iranians were friendly and hospitable. The official’s uncle had lived in Luton in the late 1970s and 80s and told him stories of great Hatters teams. Did I know Luton Town? How could I forget?

In March 2014, Luton Town were a non-league side in England’s fifth division, having spent five seasons outside of the Football League, which had been their home since 1894.

It was a surprise. Luton Town were the first professional football club in southern England. In the 1970s and 80s, the Iranian border official’s uncle had indeed watched some great Luton sides. They finished as high as seventh in England’s top tier in 1987 and won the League Cup the following year in a thrilling 3-2 final against Arsenal, with two Luton goals in the last eight minutes.

Players from that era including Les Sealey, Mick Harford, the Stein brothers, Ricky Hill, Steve Foster, Mal Donaghy and Danny Wilson were well known and respected.

That was then. The only founder member of the Premier League who have never played in the Premier League, Luton went down and down from 1992 but, in the true traditions of their yo-yo history, whenever they get knocked down, they get back up again.

Third in the Championship, Luton Town have reached the play-offs for the Premier League, where they will meet Sunderland home and away in the semi-finals. Sunderland are the Championship’s best supported team with an average home crowd this season of 39,035; Luton have the smallest, 9,854.

Luton also have a self-imposed pay cap – their wage bill is less than £150,000 ($188,000) per week for all the players, an average of £6,000 for each man among teams where the median is £14,000. The team is made up of journeymen and nearly men like captain Sonny Bradley, players who have cost a pittance but have risen far higher than expected.

Luton’s latest fine manager is Rob Edwards, who, like many professional football managers, has been sacked by Watford – in his case after 11 games this season. That struggling Watford are Luton’s main rivals and Edwards is excelling makes it sweeter for fans, but could Luton and their tiny ground really host Premier League football? The National paid a visit and spoke to key people at the club.

I arrived in Luton with a preconceived low opinion of the town, a subconscious view linking it to far right politics and no notable attractions – there’s not a single mention of Luton in the 1,000 page Rough Guide to Britain. The train station is shabby, the airport, London’s fourth, is the main reason most outsiders visit the outskirts of the city-sized-town of 218,000 located 30 miles north of London.

Twenty minutes with the club’s chief executive Gary Sweet and you begin to think that Luton has more going for it than London or New York City.

“Luton’s not a tourist town,” he said as stewards bang seats into position behind him ahead of a big game against promotion-chasing Middlesbrough. “It’s an industrial town. Cars, hats, aircraft, airport. It’s a town of engineers, builders, musicians, boxers. It has a creative edge to it but it’s a rough, tough town.

"All of that could be described as how we play football together, how we work together. We’re a team, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. We’re tight knit, we have good people with the right moral compass who care about others more than themselves. We’re lean. We replicated the culture of the town at the football club – and that’s why we’re successful. It’s not about us having good looks, we don’t.”

Luton fan and writer Kevin Crowe said: “It’s like a northern industrial town in the south. You have to squint to see the beauty, but there’s plenty of it. It’s a Labour-voting enclave in a sea of wealthy Conservatives. One in six of the town had Irish ancestry at one point.

"Now there are big Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Polish communities. Luton’s always had big influxes of immigration, a cultural melting pot. Culture clashes brought attention: Islamic extremism versus the extreme right would be the cartoon way of portraying it, but the reality is that most people rub along together.”

Sweet added: “Luton is an inclusive town which has always had huge amounts if immigration, be it Welsh and Scottish pre-World War Two, the Irish, Afro Caribbeans, East Europeans, Asians. As people come in, they become Lutonian.”

Luton is one of only three towns in the United Kingdom with a white British population below 50 per cent. Thirty per cent of Lutonians are Asian, mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi, 10 per cent black. Over 23 per cent of its inhabitants are Muslim and a billboard behind the dilapidated stand encourages Muslims to Reflect during Ramadan.

“It captures peoples’ hearts,” Sweet said. “There’s something about the town that doesn’t leave you. There are Lutonians who now live elsewhere who are still Lutonian. They don’t say they’re from Bedford (the county), it’s Luton. There’s pride here, self-pride from the collective ego.”

Sweet first visited Luton's stadium, Kenilworth Road, aged seven with his mother, Gladys.

“I told her the day before that I wanted an Arsenal top,” he explained. “She didn’t like that and took me to see Luton the next day. My first memory was the aroma. Liniment, smoke, old men.”

There were many downs punctured by the occasional up. A large flag which hangs permanently under the stand to Sweet’s left reads: “Luton Town. Est 1885. Betrayed by the FA 2008”. That was when Luton were deducted 30 points for financial irregularities as the club dropped three divisions in as many seasons. It still rankles.

“Absolutely,” Sweet sad. “You can’t have memories like that fading. It stays with us and should stay with us. When we move to our new home that flag will come with us. I get on really well with people at the FA, but they can’t deny that it was harsh treatment. We’re not going to hide from it and there are plenty of songs about it. We feel harshly treated, but let’s come back the right way. It’s not about lessons, just self-pride.”

Crowe shared Sweet's sentiment. “We just felt angry,” he said. “That the FA and the Football League were trying to kill us off as a football club. They were incompetent and it was an overly harsh punishment. Our re-birth, and fans taking control from owners who shouldn’t have been there, is sticking it to the people who tried to kill us off.”

“It was bleak,” said Crowe of non-league life. “With some grim defeats at places we’d not been to before like Hyde and Gateshead. In our head we should have been battering these teams. The lows were varied and many.”

The rain doesn’t make Kenilworth Road look any prettier, but it is beyond redemption as a football ground. There is no future for it, no space to expand. It is virtually unchanged in 30 years, a hotch-potch of uneasily juxtaposed structures – and that’s just the main stand. It’s too small, too cramped, but oh does it feel like a football ground, with pictures of past glories and flags hung from the back.

It is full of character, the opposite of many of the identikit bowls of new English football stadia. Jonathan Woodgate, who played at Real Madrid, loved it when he visited during his brief spell as Middlesbrough manager and said he could smell the football.

There was an hour until kick off and fans of Middlesbrough, managed by Michael Carrick, funnelled into the stadium between the terraced houses, where they lead to another terrace, to fill the Oak Road Stand. The entrance has become the stuff of social media lore.

“We had all the football aggregator accounts recently discovering that Kenilworth Road has got an entrance through someone’s garden,” Crowe said. “It has been like that for a hundred years. But, on the other hand, it has been good that Luton Town are getting more media coverage.”

We sat in the main stand next to legendary Luton forward Danny Hylton, who was with the Hatters (the club’s nickname because of the town’s link with the hatmaking industry) for seven years and is still playing for Northampton Town in the fourth tier. He joined when Luton were in League Two, scoring 27 and 23 goals in his first two seasons and played through to the Championship in 2019.

“We got better every year,” he said. “Luton’s a family club in a traditional old school stadium with no glitz and glamour or riches of the Premier League. But it’s still a special stadium, opponents don’t like to come here. I hated it as an opposing player, it was hostile and the fans are on top of you. It’s not easy on the eye but when you play for the club you love it, it’s the 12th man. I loved my time here. I had a brilliant rapport with fans and that’s why I still come to games when I’m not playing.”

Other players stayed even longer.

“Pelly Ruddock joined when Luton were a non-league team,” Hylton explained. “This isn’t normal in football. The managers here don’t recruit for instant success but for the next two to three years. I was here under Nathan Jones, a wonderful manager. Even better, a wonderful person.”

Luton’s rise is a compelling story, maybe why an American was sitting close by “to pay a visit,” he sad before leaving at half time to fly back to New York. “There’s demand for stories like this after the Wrexham documentary.”

One, odd-looking, side of Kenilworth Road features only executive boxes for 210 fans. Behind, there are back-to-back terraced houses that are closer to the pitch than any stadium in England’s Football League. It is on this side where Luton will spend money this summer if they go up, dispelling rumours that Luton might have to groundshare, even with nearby – and despised – rivals Watford.

“Absolutely not,” Sweet answered. “It’ll cost us quite a bit, £8-£10 million, to redevelop Kenilworth Road with new cabling, press seats, broadcast units, floodlights. We’d have to practically rebuild one stand, but the money we need to spend here would be a pittance in comparison to every pound we pay anyone else to groundshare. If we get promoted, we want to be in our home.

This is our home and it’s been home for 118 years. We’re not going to change just because the Premier League don’t like it … this is reality, football reality. And, actually, it’s a great story because of this stadium, this old, great stadium.”

Luton started looking to build a new stadium in 1960. Domes and idealised plans on different sites around the town have been produced many times since, but no new stadium.

It’s the same with the town: gentrification never happened despite the airport and proximity to London.

The new stadium should finally happen, a 23,000-seater at Power Court on the site of a former power station closer to the town centre. They’re hoping to start this year and Luton could become the only club in the world to be paying to oversee work at two stadiums this summer.

Luton should be able to fill a bigger home: football attendances are booming across England and the team took 42,000 to Wembley for a Johnstone’s Paint final in 2009. A similar figure could go to Wembley if they overcome Sunderland.

“It’s hard to get a ticket these days,” Crowe said. “Demand actually increased with the siege mentality when we went down and down. The club meant something again, people felt they had to fight for the club and make the effort to go to games or they could lose the club. And we’ve always had fans from Scandinavia and Holland. We punch above our weight.”

But how have Luton got ahead of far bigger clubs, paying far less money?

“We’re ahead of some football clubs that have bigger stadiums today, but maybe not tomorrow,” Sweet countered. “We’re ahead of some football clubs who’d suggest that they have more supporters, but that’s only because we can only fit 10,000 here. So that’s not really true. So if you go back to the 70s we were a big club and we will be again.”

They have recruited well into a culture where “if they come, they become one of us. They hold a belief that when we work together there’s a lot more that can be achieved. Egos don’t win cups, teams do.”

Luton don’t have a wealthy benefactor, but help from shareholders (and one in particular) of a privately run club where fans do have genuine influence.

“We’re reasonably sustainably run,” Sweet said. “It’s impossible to be sustainably run in the Championship today.”

But who is Sweet?

“Gary used to post on the (fans) message board,” Crowe said. “There’s a trust in these people that spreads far and deep among Luton fans. The 20/20 consortium who own the club are supporters who we trust. They make decisions - not football decisions - to make the fans happy.

"Their values align with those of the fans because they are fans, despite modern football being a capitalist beast. We’re the only club in the top two divisions who take no money from gambling companies, for instance. If you email Gary then he emails you back. We feel like a big club but in so many ways we’re local and small. If you have a problem with ticketing then we can speak to Mike in the ticket office. They know what their jobs are, they are custodians of the club. With our previous owners, who were not fans, there was none of that.”

Luton make the right decisions off the pitch and on it. Paul Watson is a respected sports director. Former legendary player Mick Harford has been a mainstay, doing several jobs at the club. Harford played in the last top flight game in 1992.

“His stability means a great deal,” Sweet said. “He reflects us in so many ways. He’s honest, hardworking, direct and will tell you straight, like it or not. The way he played was like our town: industrial.

“A promotion for Luton would not just be astronomical for the club itself,” Sweet added. “It’s not just from the positive social impact it will have but the perception of Luton will change instantly, as it has in so many other towns. Look at Hull — Hull would probably never have been considered a cultural city the way it was.

"It became City of Culture (in 2017) and it wouldn’t have if it hadn’t spent that time in the Premier League. The economic impact would be huge, several dozens of millions I imagine that it would bring to the economy, which it desperately needs. We’re probably one of the biggest clubs not to play in it, with our support base if not necessarily the stadium at the moment.”

Luton came from behind to defeat Middlesbrough, who will also be in the play-offs. The players spotted Hylton in the press area and shouted to him from the pitch.

“Pretending to be a journalist!” shouted one. They all laughed, Hylton laughed. Luton is laughing. They lost only eight of 46 league games all season and despite all the talk of their inhospitable home, their away record is the second best in the league.

In the Nick Owen Lounge, named after a former breakfast TV host, afterwards, 20 goal striker Carlton Morris smiled after another win: “Every footballer aspires to play in the Premier League. We have to focus on the next game but, of course, it’s the pinnacle to get to the Premier League for the club, fans, players, everyone.”

Luton’s objective at the start of this season was to avoid relegation.

“We’re getting into new ground, we don’t quite know what’s around the corner,” Sweet said. “That’s exciting and fun but we just have to make sure we don’t fall back. Last season we finished sixth, this season third. That’s seven seasons in a row where we’ve gone one step further. If we don’t make it this season then it has to be promotion next season.”

Luton in the Premier League?

“Of course,” Hylton said, “I can’t wait to see it happen and see Arsenal, Man United, Man City come here and get changed in those tight, cold, dressing rooms. If it happens and Luton go up, it will be fully deserved.”

Crowe agreed, saying: “It’s mind blowing. I remember thinking about what it would be like to get back into the Football League and that seems like five minutes ago. You couldn’t have written this season any better than it worked out – we beat Watford and what is happening to Watford is lovely, having Pelly Ruddock there all the way through and having Mick Harford, who had been at every significant point in our modern history and he’s still there as the head of recruitment.

"If we go up we should get the money, have a few good away days, beat teams at Kenilworth, get relegated and build the ground. We love Kenilworth Road, I get pathetically emotional about the place, but the new ground is what will secure the future of the club. But it’ll be some party if we get there.”