In the window of an evangelical church in Luton town centre, a sign reads “Sunday of empowerment” and labels five ways in which the power of prayer can be used to great effect.
Keeping your team in the Premier League is not one. Even they cannot pretend to guarantee miracles like these. Luton Town are going down — it’s just not yet mathematically certain.
Outside The White House, a Wetherspoons located in The Galaxy leisure complex near the Town Hall, dozens of Luton fans sat dressed in their orange or white shirts. The beer and cider is flowing, cigarette smoke hangs in the air for a second before dissipating and the sun is gloriously warm. Close your eyes for a second or two, and you might just trick yourself into believing that it is August all over again.
I am in Luton because it is the last day of the Premier League season and the last day of their Premier League experience. In east Manchester and north London, a title race is playing out despite everyone knowing how it always ends. The relegation battle is even more secure.
I wanted to come here because, over the last few weeks, Luton’s relegation has felt very unusual for English football in 2024, that petri dish of aggressive trolling and bitterness.
This is not a team in a financial crisis nor with a new takeover, the only two things that usually allow for universal patience. Yet there has been no anger, no spat out demands for recrimination or root-and-branch review. No player is being told they are not fit to wear the shirt and the manager is not having his continued employment questioned by three sides of the stadium.
The final afternoon epitomises this perfectly. Luton lose, as they have largely been doing all season. They concede four goals and score a couple, which is about right for this (deeply) defensively flawed but ambitious team.
A player goes off injured; standard. Luton do some complex things well and some basic things terribly.
The goals are cheered and the goals against are… sort of cheered too? Instead of the usual grumbling and griping, the sour mood of failure that leaves the air thick with resentment, as if trouble may break out at any point, there is a vaguely party-like atmosphere as Luton have their relegation confirmed. They sing about winning 12-0, with the customary nod to sarcasm, but mainly focusing on saluting those who they love.
Ross Barkley is not fit but they serenade him and ask him to stay, even though nobody thinks that there’s any chance he will. Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu gets his dues off the bench. James Shea, No 1 goalkeeper by shirt number if not reputation, comes on and makes a fine save and generates what feels like the biggest cheer of the season.
During the post-match lap of honour, everyone stays and everyone thanks one another — staff to players, players to manager, everyone to supporters. The acceptance of their fate — at least on the pitch — could easily be a cause of some regret. Luton ran out of juice in early February, but they really could have stayed up.
The financial inequality within the Premier League made them automatic picks for relegation, but it wasn’t really what sent them down. If Luton had not lost to Burnley, Sheffield United and Brentford at home by an aggregate score of 10-3, they may have survived. Rob Edwards’ team took six points from their last 16 league games.
You can make an argument that Luton have rather fallen into the trap of self-fulfillment. Hear all that aggressive patronising often enough — “The away end through the house! The long stand that holds about 1,000 people! They have players I’ve never heard of!” — and it begins to seep into your pores. Did Luton have it implied to them so often that they were sat at the wrong table that they began to believe it? Maybe.
This mood then, this determination to see the bright side, has been generated because Luton were never supposed to be here and as such have found the Premier League to be an odd experience. Getting promoted was reason for immense joy, not least because of the financial rewards it provided (and will continue to do through parachute payments). And as the lady on the Cafe Express burger van outside the ground said with a smile: “We’ve got more games next season so that’s good”.
But that joy focused not on the destination, but the journey. It was a beacon of Luton’s achievement in rebuilding after an economic emergency, of pulling themselves up through clever recruitment, savvy operation and bringing the supporters closer to the club. It was the final point of their redemption arc.
It was proof of everything that had been done, by Gary Sweet and Mick Harford and David Wilkinson and the Supporters’ Trust and dozens of others who worked to save a social institution.
Luton Town will miss the Premier League money, but it will have its effect. Hours earlier, I had left my car on Power Court, a bumpy bit of brownfield wasteland near to the railway line and the River Lea on the east edge of the city centre. One year soon, that may well be Luton Town’s new home. Last week, plans were submitted to re-route the river. Again here, the journey has been long and arduous.
Luton will miss the Premier League too. This is a town that endures a complex reputation, known as a transport hub, a home of religious extremism and the unwilling de facto hotbed of the English Defence League thanks to links with convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Even aside from those albatrosses, Luton is struggling like every conurbation in a country where services have been starved. More than a quarter of the town’s children live in poverty.
For a season at least, its football club (one that has done so much to work with the positive elements of the local community in which it exists) offered a different headline to the usual. Luton was not this or that but… Premier League. Chiedozie Ogbene, Elijah Adebayo and Teden Mengi were the ambassadors, Edwards the mayor. It was a chance to make Luton — its diversity, its culture, its development and its continued needs — more visible.
Luton Town are not perfect. Supporters have caused fines and criticism for homophobic chants and tragedy chanting this season. That element of the fanbase caused Edwards to publicly apologise to Brighton and Liverpool personally and it is a gross shame that both were necessary. Those people give Luton Town a bad name.
But as a club, they are a statue to what can be achieved through and after adversity thanks to hard work, a commitment to long-term planning, a faith in appointing the right people and a patience in players to develop and grow. Professional football only works if getting all that right leads to you being repaid with success. Like Ipswich Town after them, we should laud those who fight above their financial weight. Sport needs underdogs.
Back to the patronising, because we’ve got it all wrong. Social media banter accounts and major media outlets weren’t gawping at the away end or the amusing tiny corner of the one stand that held 60 away fans in to meet Premier League requirements because they were calling Luton tinpot (or at least most weren’t). Subconsciously they were crying out for an antidote to the homogeneity of the Premier League matchday experience because that is what makes those experiences particularly memorable and therefore worthwhile.
The walk through to the Nick Owen and Eric Morecambe suites, as if you are slipping from outside to underground to discover hidden vaults, is reason enough to fill you with joy. This is what makes English football’s pyramid beautiful. Sport needs its underdogs to be different.
Luton are not quite the underdogs anymore, however much evidence to the contrary you can find. Being in the Premier League may or may not change you but it certainly changes your perception in the Championship. Parachute payments allow for easier investment and, so the commitment to do things right starts again.
I trundle away from The Kenny, down Oak Road and into the hubbub of cosmopolitan Luton, another world existing past the turnstiles. Perhaps it’s just the glow of early evening sunshine on the first hot Sunday of the year, perhaps there’s something about sitting close to the pitch when players and supporters are interacting or perhaps I’m simply a daft football romantic. But I can’t help but feel that the Premier League will miss Luton Town.
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