this new money saturated the Premiership the wages of the best players rose astonishingly. In 1991/2 the entire top-flight wage bill was £75m; by 2012-13 it was £1.783bn. In 2012/13 the highest paying club, Manchester City, alone shelled out £233m. A November 2014 survey put the average Premier League player’s salary at around £2.3 million per year, or £43,717 per week.[1]
The top of the English game was suddenly drenched in money. This is a well-known story; part of my country’s culture. Footballers’ lives, their wives, their cars and their excesses are acknowledged. What is less talked about is how the gap between the haves and have-nots of the game, between the wealthy clubs at the top and the struggling ones at the bottom, has widened. In 2012-13, Premier League clubs received an average of £60m each in broadcast revenue. Clubs in the fourth tier, at Luton’s level, receive a hundredth of that amount.
The very existence of four tiers of fully professional football is an English exception; elsewhere in Europe the game usually swiftly fissures into part-time, often regional competitions below the top flight. “England and Germany are the only countries where people will watch bad football in reasonable numbers,” Simon Kuper, co-author of the 2009 book, Soccernomics[2] suggested to me. A recent second-tier game in the Netherlands saw an attendance of just 72.
It seemed that the pursuit of a leather ball, a sport the English invented and now which, at a national level at least, they cannot win, had become a mirror for a wider English phenomenon. Football mirrored inequality. And inequality, at least in London, city of non-domiciled billionaires and unaffordable housing, had in return eclipsed football as the true English national sport.
Yet there suddenly seemed to me to be something deeper here. There was a hidden truth. It seemed that at the lower levels of professional football something else had been happening, something glacial and well concealed. The money gap with the top had widened, but the early steers I received were that wages at the bottom had still crept up, faster than inflation, for year after year.
“There’s more money in the lower reaches of English football than there has ever been,” explained Dan Jones, who heads up the sports business group at accounting firm Deloitte. “I don’t think any one ever says that truth, but it is there.”
I wanted to see this truth. And I wanted to see what it meant to men slogging their guts out each weekend, well below the national exposure and the fame. So I approached a slew of clubs in what is termed League Two, the fourth tier and lowest fully professional rung of English football. The nomenclature is complicated. The top flight has, since 1992, called itself the Premiership. That move made the old first division the second tier. In 2004 the first division rechristened itself the ‘Championship.’ The third tier became ‘League One.’ League Two, the next one down, is the fourth rung. The bottom of this world.
My aim was to spend a week embedded with a club, to be a “fly on their wall”. That is a major ask of any institution. The sides I approached first, teams like Hartlepool, Morecambe and Mansfield, located in northern industrial towns that I felt might symbolise the position of sport in their communities, did not wish to co-operate. Luton Town however, down in Bedfordshire outside London, were willing to let me come. As it turned out, Luton were the neatest fit imaginable.
I wanted to know what had happened to the bottom of English football during the time the money poured into the top. I visited a club that had, in that time period, walked the line between those two worlds. In the 1980s English football was troubled; hooliganism and racism were rife, average top flight attendance in 1985 was 19,563, compared to 36,695 in 2013-14. Still, back then Luton Town played in the first division. On 24 April 1988 two goals by Brian Stein secured a 3-2 victory against London titans Arsenal in the final of the League Cup at Wembley.
In 1991-2 Luton were party to the Premiership pre-launch discussions. But they were relegated that season and later fell much, much further down the football firmament. Luton never had the opportunity to play in the new league they helped to design. Dominic Allan, an artist who has exhibited at London’s Saatchi Gallery under the nom de plume ‘Dominic from Luton,’ attended the crucial away defeat at Notts County in April 1992 that sealed their fate.
“I was 15 at the time,” he explained to me. “Men my dad’s age and older just sobbing, sobbing because we’d been relegated from the old first division, now the Premier League, but knowing that three, four months time from that day was the start of a new era in English football, and knowing that we’d missed out.”
Luton spent much of the nineties in the third tier, rising briefly in the middle of the next decade to the second. Between 2007 and 2009 though, the club was relegated three times in three seasons. A series of administrative irregularities culminated in drastic points deductions. In 2009 Luton fell out of the league entirely, and spent the next five years in the feeder competition below, the Conference, a division that includes semi-professional clubs. Last season, in April 2014, Luton finished as Conference champions, ending their long exile. When I visited they were beginning their first spell back in the football league. Hopes were high.
But they were still in the fourth tier. Still, going into that October weekend, 71 places below Manchester United, 74 below Arsenal and fully 77 below Chelsea, then top of the Premiership.
Luton were a neat fit for their football history, but there was much more here too. The town had become a cruel byword for urban mediocrity in the UK. In 2004 more than 20,000 people voted Luton ‘Britain’s crappest town’ in a national online poll. The town represents the fate of much of provincial Britain, left behind by booming London and its financial services sector. Luton Town’s nickname – the Hatters – riffs on the town’s onetime reputation as a centre for millinery, but the industrial sector had withered. Luton had experienced massive South Asian immigration too. From an external point of view race relations seemed complex. In recent years a constellation of serious jihadists has emerged with connections to the town, including Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, who blew himself up on a shopping street in Stockholm in 2010, and three men who died fighting for the Taliban.
There was a counter-surge to the radicalism. Luton gave birth to the English Defence League (EDL), an organisation born in 2009 that daubed itself in the St. George’s Cross, the English flag long associated with the far right, and marched against perceived Islamification. The EDL became a bête noire for liberal opinion in Britain. Just as Luton Town’s nickname riffed on industrial decline, so the racial story was intrinsically tied up with the football team. Kenilworth Road stadium sits in the heart of a Muslim area but the fans are mostly white. Local pubs have closed and there is nowhere to drink before games.
Tommy Robinson, the young demagogue who founded the English Defence League, is a life long Luton Town fan, a man who forged much of his identity on the terraces at Kenilworth Road. “Everyone I know, I know through going to football,” he would tell me later. “All of my friends, my friendships, everything around us, has been based around Luton Town football club, from a young age.”
I knew that in Luton I would see the recent developments at the bottom of English football. I hoped to also encounter a wider English story of race, class and the pursuit of fame. One Thursday evening in autumn I packed my bags. Early the next morning I took the train up from London. The next day the club played away at Stevenage.
1 Nick Harris's report for the MailOnline 14th November 2014 http://dailym.ai/1EDOegi ↵
2 Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey ‑ and Even Iraq‑ Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, pub. Harper Sport 2009 https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/6617185-soccernomics↵