The Premier League’s newest club haven’t played in English football’s top-flight for three decades.
Their home is a stadium that holds just
10,000 people and which is partly accessible through a back garden.
They will also shortly become the first club to reach the Premier League from non-league football.
And, when they do, they’ll field a player who has represented them in all five of the top divisions.
But who are Luton Town?
On the last week of May, after a gruelling 120 minutes and a penalty shootout,
Luton won promotion to the Premier League via the Championship playoffs.
It was an achievement all the remarkable after their captain,
Tom Lockyer, collapsed in early in the first half and had to watch the
end of the game from a hospital bed, surrounded by his family.
It was an extraordinary day, but only the last part of an amazing and improbable journey.
Luton were relegated from the old Division in 1992, the summer before the Premier League and its
soon-to-be lucrative broadcasting contract began. Two more relegations would follow during the next
decade, and while the club had climbed back as far as the Championship in the newly structured league
by 2005, two straight relegations between 2006 and 2008, left Luton in League Two and in deep peril.
Ahead of that 2008-09 season, still beset by financial difficulties and punished for breaching
league rules governing clubs in administration, Luton actually began the campaign on -30 points.
Unsurprisingly, they would finish last – 92nd among all 92 professional
clubs - and be relegated out of the Football League and down into what
was then known as the Conference Premier Division, the fifth tier.
They would languish there for five years until, eventually,
they were promoted back into League Two in 2014.
Amazingly, in the nine years that would follow and culminating in May 2023’s Wembley win, they
would scale the entire football pyramid. They were promoted from League Two in 2018,
League One in 2019, and while they were eliminated in the Championship playoffs
in 2022, in 2023, at the second time of asking, they completed their journey back.
Home during that period – and since 1905 – has been Kenilworth Road, which holds 10,356 fans
when full and will soon become the smallest ground to ever stage a Premier League match.
30 miles north-west of London, Luton is home to around a quarter of a million people,
and its football stadium is tucked between rows of terraced houses. The entrance to part of the
ground, the Oak Road Stand, is actually between some of those terraced houses,
and the route into the stadium even passes over local residents’ gardens.
In the wake of promotion and in accordance with Premier League rules around stadium facilities,
Kenilworth Road will undergo a £10m renovation over the summer. Its press and broadcasting
facilities will be expanded, and the strength of its floodlights will have to be improved.
Even with the changes, Kenilworth Road will remain more or less the
same ground that hosted National League football a decade ago.
“I think it’ll be an asset to the Premier League,” says the club’s chief executive
Gary Sweet. “This is proper, real life, real football. This isn’t a sterile bowl of a stadium.
If you can’t embrace it, you don’t love football.”
Sweet has a long history with Luton. He’s a fan and was a founding member
of the Supporters Trust that forced John Gurney, a hugely unpopular former owner,
to relinquish the club in 2003. After the collapse of broadcaster ITV Digital,
Luton were burdened by heavy debts and were acquired by Gurney’s consortium for just £4.
He had ideas. He wanted to change the club’s name to match the local airport. He wanted to
merge with Wimbledon before they left for Milton Keynes. He also wanted a new stadium surrounded
by a Formula One track and for supporters to vote on their next head-coach in phone-in poll.
Gurney lasted 55 days before being outmanoeuvred and
ousted by the trust. Today, it owns a share holding,
but the club is controlled by a consortium of supporters that was originally led by Sweet.
So, Luton are stable after decades of chaos, but their spending has hardly been extravagant.
In fact, the context of their promotion is the frugality with which it’s been achieved.
Only three times in the club’s history have they spent more than a £1m on a player. Luton’s
transfer-record also stands at just under £2m, and that was set last summer and spent
on Barnsley’s Carlton Morris, who was Town’s top-scorer in the Championship in 2022-23.
According to figures from Transfermarkt.com, Luton’s net spend for last season was only just
over £1m, which was only the eleventh highest in the division. The two teams that were promoted
with them, Burnley and Sheffield United, had net spends of £37m and £3.9m respectively. And,
importantly, squad values far in excess of what Luton head-coach Rob Edwards had at his disposal.
Edwards didn’t even start the season as Luton head-coach.
Nathan Jones, in his second spell at the club, left to become manager of Southampton
in November 2022 and the Hatters appointed Edwards to replace him. As a quirk of fate,
he’d been sacked by Watford – a near rival to the south – in September. And yet,
while his big-spending old club cycled through another two coaches before finishing the season
in a highly disappointing 11th, Edwards immediately took Luton up.
The squad that won promotion still describes the journey that his inherited players have
been on. Luke Berry, Dan Potts and James Shea were all involved at Wembley and all part of
the squad that won promotion from League Two. Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu joined the club in 2014,
when they were still in the Conference Premier. When he takes the pitch next
season, the 29 year-old midfielder will have represented the club in all five of England’s top
divisions and will become the first player to achieve that feat with the same club.
And, whether they survive in the Premier League,
Luton’s achievement in simply getting there is unlikely to be matched for a very long time.