English soccer’s untold underdog story   

Luton Town Football Club, the smallest team currently playing in the professional English football pyramid, are just one game away from doing the unthinkable and winning promotion to the land of giants: the Premier League. Never before in the history of the top division of English football has a team so clearly out of their depth been handed the chance to run with the big dogs. The closest thing we have seen to Luton was Blackpool’s promotion in 2010, but even at that time they were an established professional club. At the same time Blackpool was being promoted, Luton was languishing in the fifth tier of English professional football, the Conference League. No team that has played in the Premier League has ever played in the non-professional leagues; that record, too, may be about to fall.  

The rise, fall and subsequent rise of Luton Town is one of professional sports’ great untold stories. Believe it or not, this is not the club’s first dance with possible promotion to the Premier League. As recently as 2006, the club was finishing tenth in the Championship after winning League One the previous season. This would have been the perfect opportunity to stabilize the club’s league position before pushing for promotion. But then the wheels fell off. Three relegations in a row meant that by the start of the 2009/10 season, the Hatters had free fallen out of the professional leagues in England. And there they remained as an afterthought, with anyone who paid them any attention surely of the opinion that Luton was just another case of a hopeful club punching above their weight, only for reality to drag them back into obscurity.  

That was the case until 2014. Cue the rise from the ashes. First came promotion to League Two, where, after three consecutive seasons of narrowly missing out on promotion, the Hatters finished second and entered back into League One in 2018. Expectations were low from pundits and fans alike, but oh, how everyone was wrong. Wind fully in their sails, Luton won the division and gained automatic promotion back into the Championship. The first year back in the second tier was tough, but Luton seemed to have learned from the difficult years of the past. They survived in nineteenth place before climbing to a comfortable midtable finish of 12 in 2020/21. For many clubs of Luton’s size, this would have been their peak. But not Luton. In 2021/22, they finished sixth and qualified for the promotion playoff. They inevitably fell short, falling at the semifinal stage to former Premier League participants Huddersfield Town, before suffering a rough start to the 2022-23 season. Then came Rob Edwards, hired by the club to replace the outgoing Nathan Jones in November. And up the table they went. Luton lost just two of their final 24 matches to finish third before comfortably soaring past Sunderland in the playoff semifinal round. Now a date with Wembley for the chance to play in the Premier League awaits.  

I have written at length about how impressive a club of Luton’s size getting promoted would be. Perhaps I should quantify exactly what I mean. The club’s stadium holds 10,356 fans, with the stairs to the upper seats literally taking you through the back yard of local residents. This is just over a thousand fewer seats than the smallest stadium in the Premier League at the moment, Bournemouth’s Dean Court, which holds 11,326, and over 60,000 fewer seats than the League’s largest ground, Manchester United’s Old Trafford, which holds a reported 74,310. Luton’s record transfer expenditure is just $2.16 million, and they have spent over $1 million just three times in club history. Their record departure is just $7.2 million. Chelsea, for comparison, spent over $400 million in the previous January transfer window alone. Luton in the Premier League would be a more apt comparison to David versus Goliath than the U.S. men’s hockey team that defeated the USSR at the 1980 Winter Olympics. And I, for one, am all for it.