For 32 years since he left Luton Town, Lars Elstrup has been an enigma. The source of weird tales, outlandish episodes and bizarre antics – and then, out of the blue, he rocked up at Kenilworth Road. Was this to be another chapter in his surreal post-football folklore? This is the inside tale of a random and eye-opening afternoon spent with the Dane…. and it was nothing like I’d imagined.
For a man from the famous birthplace of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, there has never been a shortage of fairytales surrounding Lars Elstrup.
His name is still synonymous with the Hatters, but depending on their age, supporters’ knowledge of the man will be different. For fans old enough, the striker was theirs for an £850,000 record transfer fee in 1989 and two relegation-saving top-flight seasons.
Then, suffering with anxiety and homesickness, he returned to Odense from whence he came, for considerably less cash. He became an unlikely hero of his country’s fabled against-all-odds Euro ’92 triumph – and then he quit the game at his peak. And if the plan was to retreat into obscurity, it failed.
Since then, Town fans will have traded in terrace tales, myths and sensationalist tidbits of a less-than-ordinary life away from football.
From reports of cults, name changes, football streaking, Trafalgar Square trouble, and arrests, these events and choices have acted as eyebrow-raising footnotes in the Luton story. But, the infrequent tittle-tattle was almost always framed as a former footballer that had gone off the rails.
This, unfortunately, is part of our psyche and make-up as a society. One that revels in struggle and gawks at mental illness or alternative lifestyles, like some sort of old curiosity shop that stops short of real solutions, but is always ready with a collective sneer. The truth is none of our minds are immune to one degree or another, whether personally or when things spiral devastatingly out of control for a loved one, as I experienced last year.
And in sport, sadly, once the adulation stops from thousands of adoring fans, the lows appear ever repeatedly preyed upon. From Gazza to Deli Alli and many more in between, more needs to be done. It always does.
Thankfully, for Elstrup, his tale is at long last turning into a long and winding road to redemption.
“Looking back, you cannot change the past,” he tells me, adding: “You cannot change who you were. You are you. You can do things for yourself in that period of time.”
By any measure, Elstrup’s experiences sound extreme as he reveals five great periods of three-year-long depressions and “lots” of medical diagnoses which he labels “insanity” and “bi-polar” disorder. And in that context, any thirst for gory details and raking over old headlines says more about me – about us – than about Elstrup.
He is instead, warm, engaging, philosophical, an open book, and certainly nothing like I’d been led to believe before I found myself sitting next to him in a Luton Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon.
The in-real-life aspect, as it often does, reveals Elstrup not to be some sort of mythical figure but very much a regular man that’s done some extraordinary things.
Now, as a 60-year-old, he is full of pearls of wisdom that he can draw upon as he scratches at the stigma of mental illness, a subject that has still not fully shaken off its taboo tag. Though however slow the progress in the areas of knowledge, learning and acceptance, it would still seem a million miles away from the almost non-existent assistance available to Elstrup in his football heyday.
Indeed, the world has changed dramatically since the white-shirted blur of the Danish magician exploded the long-held Nottingham Forest song of the 80s and 90s, that ‘you’ll never beat Des Walker’.
But there are two things that remain reassuringly familiar from the Dane’s time in Bedfordshire.
Kenilworth Road – the gloriously old-fashioned stadium where, 24 hours before our meeting, Elstrup had turned up after half his life away – has barely changed in the intervening decades since his goals helped preserve Luton’s First Division status.
But, more importantly, and particularly as the promise of a new era beckons in one way or the other for the football club, the second familiarity is the assertion that ‘once a Hatter, always a Hatter.’
While we’re chatting over coffee in the Luton Retail Park, opposite Town’s training headquarters, The Brache, club legend and chief recruitment officer Mick Harford turns up briefly. Honestly, I’ve had fever dreams that have been less surreal, as the pair swap unprintable anecdotes about football in the old days.
But before that, as the two former goalscorers meet for the first time in more than three decades, there’s a warm embrace and later, as Harford departs, a typically jocular ribbing from his car window, with plans fixed to show Elstrup around The Brache, the following day.
Just as golfing legend Jack Nicklaus has said he could recall every hole and every shot he ever played, Elstrup remembers the small details and funny asides from his time with the Hatters and his fondness for the town shines through.
‘It’s great to be back. I don’t like Luton; I love Luton’, he wrote in a WhatsApp message prior to our rendezvous.
He was only a team-mate of Harford’s for five months before the Englishman departed for Derby County in 1990, but the presence of the man had never left the Dane.
“When I saw him I could see there was some special kind of aura around him,” Elstrup recalls of their first meeting in 1989, adding, “I could sense he was a good-hearted person and I looked up to him. And also other players, but Mick was special.”
Harford has that effect on people, associated with Luton Town Football Club.
But Elstrup also enthuses over the warm welcome he received since showing up on the hoof at Kenilworth Road. Chief executive Gary Sweet, when informed of the return of his hero from yesteryear, interrupted a Power Court meeting with architects to greet the former forward, bypassing an introductory Elstrup-offered handshake to go in straight for a hug.
This is only the Dane’s second visit to England since he returned to his homeland in 1991, and his first back to Luton, so he took a tour of his old stadium, alongside other fans.
He did so having travelled to Blighty in nomadic style with little more than the shirt on his back, so Sweet put Elstrup up in a hotel with an invite to be an honoured guest at the last night’s 2-1 triumph over Middlesbrough, where he was reintroduced to the terraces at half time.
That’s this club all over. You have to know where you’ve come from to know where you’re going. And whether it’s been three days, three months or 32 years, Luton looks after its own.
And it’s with this info and so many smiles that we finish our coffee and head to his hotel to record one of the most remarkable episodes of the Luton Town Supporters’ Trust Podcast that host Kevin Harper and I have ever done.
Even Kev’s dad Reg tags along, not wanting to pass up the sheer you-couldn’t-make-it-up opportunity of it all. Reg remembers Elstrup fondly, but the last time either of us two podcasters had clapped eyes on the Dane, we were children, still in single figures in the birthday stakes.
Yet, after the Littlewoods Cup heroes, Elstrup had been in one of the first Town teams that either of us had first truly taken notice of.
We’ve grown up with those second-hand tales of the former striker’s escapades but, in truth, our childhood memories are twofold. One, of an exotically named player that knew where the net was and, two, until the £1.3million signing of Simon Sluga in 2019, his moniker as the answer to a 30-year-old Hatters trivia question about record transfer fees.
We’re in our seventh year of the podcast and we’ve been privileged to have ridden a remarkable success story from League Two to the precipice of the Premier League. In that time we’ve sat down with many a player, past and present but, given Elstrup’s surprise arrival and the offer of a chat, we’ve never been so unprepared.
What version of the man would we be meeting? The childhood hero or the madcap caricature portrayed in the media?
Thankfully, fiction turns out to be stranger than the truth. Not that some of those stories didn’t happen, or a version of them at least. And while the man before us has his eccentricities – at one point casually mentioning a formative experience witnessing a UFO – he’s still nothing like the puzzle pieces we’d assembled all wrong in our own minds.
And by the end of our afternoon together, any preconceived notions have been well and truly expelled because he’s overwhelmingly a man finally at peace. It’s a pleasing reflection.
“For 30 years I’ve been looking for this place in the mind where I am without anxiety and fear and I’ve found this place now,” he tells us.
And he likens his struggles to Andy Dufresne, the protagonist played by Tim Robbins in the cult classic movie, The Shawshank Redemption, in that it has taken many years but he’s finally broken free of “the mental human prison.”
It’s an analogy that goes a long way to explaining a life that has been through periods of turmoil, the football part of which saw him drop out of the game entirely two years after leaving Luton, aged just 30.
“I was worn out. My body was damaged. My mind was damaged. So it was about time that I stopped my career,” he said, also admitting: “I felt kind of alone and not daring to open up to others.”
It’s the polar opposite to how he is before us, and much of the reason for his return to his old stomping ground in such fine fettle is his new spiritual path.
Kenilworth Road was the second stop-off in a brief visit to our shores, inspired by a visit to a Hindu Hannuman temple in Brentford run by his Indian guru, His Holiness Parama Pujya Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji.
It’s to these ancient Vedic traditions and teachings of yoga, meditation, music and cultural activities for the enrichment of human life that Elstrup now devotes himself. And this discovery of Sanatan Dharma (meaning righteous way of living) was a key part in his emergence from his last major depressive episode which ended 16 months ago.
In the calmly measured way he speaks and acts, there’s a tangible sense of a man in his 60th year that has finally figured it all out, which is a hopeful thought for anyone struggling with the mind or modern life.
While Elstrup was demonstrably rapid in his playing days, he’s reassuringly in no rush at all now in his retirement. He says: “The main disease of people in the West is this business of being in a hurry. Having a schedule that is overloaded. If you are running after things you will never have time to stay in an area and find the depth in that area, in that conversation.
“But we run after that and we get stressed and fear comes into our minds, and we have no time to live life. That is a bad circle to get into. You have to reverse the circle.”
Happy memories come flooding back like the fondness he has for former team-mates, or reminiscing about returning to Denmark as a European Champion.
Part of a squad that included Brian Laudrup and Peter Schmeichel, they’d initially failed to qualify for the 1992 tournament, so the outpouring of emotion on the streets of Copenhagen when they paraded the trophy he likens to the Allies liberating his country from the Nazis at the end of World War II. The emotion overtakes him.
And while he was fulfilled the excitement of a sold-out night under the lights at Kenilworth Road he preemptively explained that there would be no pining for the old days, or wishing he had his boots on again. It’s in this appreciation of the here and now that Elstrup has happily laid his hat.
And while it may have been alien to feel grass underfoot, given that Kenilworth Road was covered in an infamous plastic pitch the last term he emerged from the tunnel, in returning to Luton more grounded, he’s reconnected with the place and the people, as well as himself.
Well, you know what they say, once a Hatter, always a Hatter.
This is a companion piece to the Luton Town Supporters’ Trust Podcast exclusive episode with Lars Elstrup, which you can listen to below, or via Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Spotify.
It’s a compelling chat in which the Dane delves into his time at Luton, reminiscing on top flight great escapes which involved two famous late-season clashes against Derby County, his toughest hard-man opponents, almost leaving for a French club after his first Luton campaign and his remarkable Euro ’92 championship-winning summer with Denmark.
The conversation then moves towards life after football as Elstrup is candid about his mental health struggles post-retirement and how he has found happiness with himself and the world.
