Luton Town’s Premier League promotion leaves locals in tears
Like many in Luton, Helena Dalgarno was to be found on Sunday reliving the fairytale moment the town’s upwardly mobile football team secured a place in the Premier League and looking forward to a change in fortunes.
As landlady for the last 25 years or so at the Wheelwright’s Arms, a time-honoured watering hole for long-suffering Luton Town fans situated close to the club’s Kenilworth Road stadium, Ms Dalgarno had reason to feel elated after the penalty shoot-out victory over Coventry City in the Championship play-off final. Saturday’s 6-5 win at Wembley secured The Hatters’ return to the top flight after 31 years and came just nine years after the once extinction-threatened club were scrapping in England’s non-league.
Taking a break on Sunday lunchtime from what was rapidly turning into a three-day knees-up in the Bedfordshire town culminating in an open-top bus tour by the team on Monday afternoon, Ms Dalgarno said: “It’s actually quite hard to put into words what this means for Luton. The moment we won it was absolute bedlam – tears everywhere. You have to remember this has been a very long road for the club and the fans, there have been a lot of tears over the years, and not necessarily happy ones.
“So we’re very much looking forward to welcoming all the big teams to Luton next season. It will be a big boost for the town economically. A lot of businesses have struggled since the pandemic so the visiting teams will be a big bonus. We’re looking forward to some good times.”
With a population of about 225,000, Luton has, like its football club, had its fair share of turmoil over recent decades.
Vauxhall, long one of the area’s biggest employers, ended a century of car making in the town in 2002; although some 100,000 vans are still manufactured annually and the company remains a major employer.
But any such structural doom and gloom was far from people’s thoughts this weekend. One the dust has settled on what Luton Council is billing as a “paint the town orange” celebration, the football club and its followers will turn their thoughts to preparing for the coming season and the matter of “The Kenny”, as Luton’s stadium is affectionately known.
Dating back to 1905 and with a comparatively minuscule capacity of a little over 10,000, Luton’s Kenwilworth Road stadium is a throwback to English football stadiums of old. The ground is shoehorned into its backdrop of Victorian housing to such an extent that the entrance for visiting fans is famously set in a terrace of homes and supporters traverse a row of back gardens before reaching their seats.
The football club has pledged to spend £10m between now and August on upgrading its ageing home to welcome such Premier League aristocracy as Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal in the expectation that its intimate, cauldron-like atmosphere could allow the top flight’s new arrivals to cause an upset or two.
But while Saturday’s sudden-death shootout glory opened the door to Luton’s long-held dream of battling it out with the elite of English football, the victory is also set to facilitate another cherished aim for the club, namely a new £100m stadium.
Not for nothing is the Championship play-off final known as the most lucrative game in British football. Victory on Saturday will be worth a minimum of £170m in additional revenue over the next three seasons to Luton – some ten times what the club generated last year.
It is possible that the club, which has engineered its rise through the lower divisions with an astute grip on the finances after going into administration in 2007, will resist the urge to splurge on big signings and channel its resources into Power Court, the team’s new home planned for completion by 2026.
Nick Owen, Luton Town’s chairman for nearly a decade until 2017, said that promotion to the Premiership would pave the way to building the new stadium and the club’s support. He told BBC News: “This will facilitate, speed up, accelerate our moving to a new stadium because the funds will be so invaluable. When we do get a new stadium I think the crowds will look considerably bigger; the fanbase is huge and it’s worldwide as well.”
With a capacity of 23,000, the new stadium will still have only a fraction of the capacity of the like of Manchester United’s Old Trafford or West Ham’s London Stadium. But unlike other clubs relocating to out-of-town locations, Luton Town has taken a conscious decision to remain in the centre of the city with the new stadium a little over a mile from the existing stadium.
As Ms Dalgarno put it: “Everything is looking positive. There will be one hell of a farewell party when we leave Kenilworth Road but we’ve waited a very long time for a new stadium and suddenly now everything that we’ve hoped for looks like it is going to happen.”
