Luton chief executive Gary Sweet is convinced that football’s Coronavirus suspension will see clubs collapse from the Premier League down – but that the Hatters are in a better place than most to cope.
Football in England’s top four divisions is not due to return until at least April 30, having originally been cancelled until April 3, as the country was last night placed in lockdown to help combat the fast-accelerating pandemic.
The EFL last week announced a £50million support package for all its member clubs, to help them with their cashflow problems while there are no games. However, this is just money already owed to clubs but handed over early.
The league also resolved to continue the current season indefinitely, with a scrapping of the usual June deadline an indication that matches could be played in the summer.
Sweet, who believes the current suspension of action will be “catastrophic” and lead to a “turning point” for the English game, added: “When we resume I will guarantee you that there won’t be 72 clubs in the Football League. I wouldn’t be surprised f there’s not 20 in the Premier League.
“This is going to hurt some clubs very, very badly, very, very quickly. We are not necessarily a club that is going to be hurt this month, next month but we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure that we can get through to – the worst possible case scenario is that we don’t have a game all this season again, and our season is cancelled.
“Then we the have to get through to next season before we start bringing an income in, and that’s what we are working on at the moment.
“The plan always is to try and keep the business intact without having necessarily to lose people or resources that rely on us for their income, but that is going to be pretty difficult to achieve.”
Sweet has been vocal of the “necessity” that Premier League clubs dip into their cash reserves of £1.5billion to help alleviate the financial fears of clubs further down the football pyramid.
But EFL chairman Rick Parry has said he’s not a fan of what he calls the “begging bowl culture”.
“I’m a fan of it!” Sweet said in response, adding: “I think the distribution of funding across the leagues is wrong. It was wrong when we were in the Conference and we were in League Two and when we were in League One, and it’s wrong now.
“I think there are two things football can take out of this and that is that Financial Fair Play, as it is at the moment, absolutely proves that it doesn’t work – hence I am convinced that there will be some clubs that go to the wall over this period.
“And the second thing that we need to relook at how funds are distributed, and whether there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or not, in the Premier League.
“You have to say that, actually, the Premier League – and some of their clubs – need to understand that without these football clubs and the pyramid below it, it shouldn’t exist.
“It’s what feeds our talent through to that level at every point. Football has to exist as a family here, and I’m not saying that we should just go with the begging bowl alone, we have to help ourselves of course.
“I think that was Rick Parry’s point. He didn’t want us to go merely cap-in-hand to the Premier League from the outset, before clubs had tried to help themselves, and that’s absolutely right.
“But trust me, we are doing everything we possibly can to keep Luton Town Football Club afloat.”
