In the 2012/13 season, Luton Town finished seventh in the football conference.
Thirty years earlier, David Pleat was skipping across the Maine Road pitch — half-Socrates, half-kangaroo — after that famous last-day great escape when Luton stayed in the top flight and were relegated.
For the Hatters, the eighties were suited and booted. Two semi-finals, three top ten Division One finishes and League Cup winners in 1988, handing them their first major silverware. Mick Harford, Ricky Hill, David Preece, Mal Donaghy, the Stein brothers. Ah, the Stein brothers. A golden era.
Yet, there they were in 2013, on a coach home from a 3-1 win at Stockport, another season in non-league looming. However, step away from the Kleenex. This is not a sob story. No tissues required.
From that moment to this very day, this football club has made progress in every single season bar one, and that’s hardly worth mentioning. They won promotion back to the Football League in 2014, as champions, then finished eighth and 11th in League Two in the next two seasons. Hardly a nosedive.
Read this and don’t weep. Fourth in League Two, second in League Two, first in League One, 19th in the Championship, 12th in the Championship and, as they welcome Millwall tomorrow with just eight games to go, they are in third place in the second tier.
Remove your hat, Luton Town, and take a bow. Hold on, hold on. There must be a catch. Sugar daddy? Big investor using the club as a plaything? Wrong.
These days, working out football budgets is akin to deciphering Donald Trump’s tax returns, so I asked Price of Football podcast host Keiran McGuire.
He said: ‘Their budget is so small only recently have they had to publish full accounts. They are competing for a play-off place with a wage bill of £14million. The average in the Championship is £32m. It’s an incredible achievement, no matter what happens between now and May 7.’
Before I unleash this next paragraph on you, I must warn you I do not have a team of researchers helping me out. In fact, I’m currently writing this column in bed, with nothing but a grab-bag of Monster Munch and a large coffee by my side. Pickled Onion, before you ask.
So, I might be wrong, but I am 99.9% sure I am not. Here we go. Hold on tight. If you’ve got ’em, smoke ’em…
If Luton get promoted this season, they will become the first English football club ever to drop all the way from the top flight to non-league, and then gain promotion all the way back to the top flight again. Not ‘in the Premier League era’. Not ‘this century’. Ever.
Forget the bow, Luton Town. Take a lap of honour. In an era of all-too-common reckless, unconscionable ownership, Luton show that a Championship club can be sustainable and competitive.
Given this historic rise, I don’t have the space to properly praise manager Nathan Jones, and the job he has done at a club that, over two stints, fits him like Cinderella’s slipper.
I also don’t have the space to heap praise on a team that works hard and stays humble. Sure, Elijah Adebayo is having the season of his career, but Amari’i Bell, Harry Cornick, James Bree, Luke Berry, Cameron Jerome, and the list goes on. Just look up their whole squad. That’s their ‘player’ of the season.
Put simply, it will be unprecedented if they gain promotion, remarkable if they make the play-offs, and still pretty extraordinary if they fall agonisingly short.
Either way, it’s nosebleed territory. That’s why Luton fans might need those tissues after all.
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