With the title already in the hands of Manchester City, the Premier League will play in full on Sunday the last date of its season. While there are still issues to be resolved in the top flight, such as some qualification places to the continental cups and two relegations, the main attraction of the weekend in English football will not reside there, but in the duel that will define the third promotion from the Football League Championship, the second category, and that will offer the chance to return to the elite to small Luton Town.
The team from this city in the south of England, located 50 kilometers north of London, will face Coventry City on Saturday at 12.45 at Wembley in the final match of the playoffs that will decide which team will accompany Burnley and Sheffield United, champion and runner-up of the Championship, who have already secured their place in the next edition of the Premier League.
Carlton Morris scored 20 goals in this Football League Championship season. Photo: Twitter @LutonTown.
Coventry, who finished fifth in the competition and left Middlesbrough in one of the playoff semi-finals, were one of the mainstays of the Premier League between 1992 and 2001. In contrast, Luton, who were sixth in the second division and eliminated Sunderland in the other semi-final, have a more modest history and their last presence in the elite culminated more than three decades ago.
In a city renowned for the manufacture of hats and cars (there was for almost a century the main plant of the Vauxhall firm), Luton Town was born on April 11, 1885, was one of the founding clubs of the Southern League in 1894 and spent its first 70 years of history in the promotion categories of English football until it rose to the first division in 1955.
Luton Town were English League Cup winners in 1988.
Five seasons in that first cycle and one more campaign in the mid-1970s preceded the third, last, and brightest cycle in the elite, which ran from 1982 to 1992. In that decade they not only reached an outstanding sixth place in 1987, but were also League Cup champions in 1988 (defeated Arsenal 3-2 in the final at Wembley) and runners-up in 1989 (lost 3-1 to Nottingham Forest).
A 2–1 away defeat to Notts County on 2 May 1992 on the last date of the last season prior to the birth of the Premier League saw the Hatters relegated to the second division and also the start of a dismal period that included changes of ownership. A bankruptcy in 2007, financial irregularities that produced a discount of 30 points in 2008 and the fall in 2009 to the fifth division. Thus they were left out of the Football League, the scheme of English professional football, after 89 years.
Welshman Rob Edwards has been managing Luton Town since November 2022. Photo: Twitter @LutonTown.
Luton had to spend five seasons in the then Conference League (now called the National League) before starting to climb the hill again: it was champion of the fifth division in 2014; promoted from League Two in 2018, after finishing second in the tournament won by Accrington Stanley; and took the League One title in 2019. On Saturday he will try to make the last leap in this meteoric climb towards the Prmier League, the competition he helped found, but in which he could never participate.
To reach this instance, he had to become strong in a contest as long as demanding (46 dates), in which, in addition, he suffered a change of coach halfway: the Welshman Nathan Jones, the coach who had guided him to promotion in League Two in 2018, left for Southampton and was replaced by his compatriot Rob Edwards, who had been League Two champions with Forest Green Rovers in the 2021/22 season and had started 2022/23 at Watford, but had been sacked after only 10 games.
In November last year, Edwards took the helm of Luton with the orange jersey in ninth place. In six months he took it to the third step of the table, with an unbeaten 13 games in the final segment of the contest, and to the final for the third promotion. In this was fundamental the contribution of striker Carlton Morris, author of 20 goals in 44 games.
The solid walk of this team and the concrete chance of getting promoted made many eyes fall on this club. And not only about its players or its coaching staff, but also about Kenilworth Road, its picturesque stadium with capacity for only 10,265 spectators and that maintains the aesthetics of the old British coliseums that were falling into disuse, especially after the tragedies of Hillsborough and Valley Parade in the 1980s.
Kenilworth Road has been located since 1905 in the district of Bury Park, a residential area located 1.6 kilometers from the city center. Although it reached a record attendance of 30,069 in 1959 (in a match against Blackpool for the FA Cup), over the years its capacity was reduced to a third. If Luton is promoted, their stadium will be the smallest in the Premier League. Currently that condition belongs to Vitality Stadium, the Bournemouth building, which has 11,307 seats.
Kenilworth Road, Luton Town's stadium, holds just 10,265 spectators. Photo: Twitter @LutonTown.
Although Luton plans to build a new stadium with a capacity for 23,000 spectators, the project, approved in January 2019, has not yet progressed beyond that, since the works have not yet begun. Because of that, he must continue to use Kenilworth Road if he is promoted, although first he must carry out works to adapt it to the demands of the Premier League.
"Maybe it's a bigger task than building a new stadium," Gary Sweet, the club's chief executive, said in an interview with the BBC last month. The manager explained that the club would have to "rebuild a stand in less than three months" and estimated that this would require an investment of between eight and ten million pounds.
Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu is on his fourth promotion in a Luton Town jersey. Photo: Luton Town Press.
For the leadership of the Hatters to focus on that headache, first the team must emerge victorious from the final against Coventry City, a meeting that has generated a capital expectation in the city: fans sold out on Tuesday the 36,493 tickets that were allocated to them for Saturday's match at Wembley.
If this match represents an unprecedented opportunity for many of the supporters, it will also offer a historic chance to Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu. The midfielder, from a Congolese family and born 29 years ago in London, arrived at Luton from West Ham United in 2013, has played 366 games and participated in all three promotions in the last decade. If his team wins on Saturday, he will become the first player to move from the fifth to the top division of English football with the same club.
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