The Coronavirus pandemic will ‘harm football’ but Gary Sweet believes Luton will be in a stronger position that most of their rivals when the crisis is over, because of prudent management from the 2020 board of directors.
Football is suspended until at least April 30 as the disease sweeps through the country and the EFL has already approved the early release of £50million worth of funds for its 72 member clubs.
The Hatters chief executive is convinced that some Football League clubs will ‘go to the wall’ over the enforced shutdown, with most of Town’s Championship rivals operating in the red already, enabled skewed financial fair play rules that allow hefty losses.
Relegation-threatened Luton have not indulged in that spending frenzy and operate on one of the smallest budgets in the league.
Sweet said: “Our plan this season wasn’t to lose money and I think every single other club in the Championship will lose money.
“You’ve seen the kinds of losses that some of those clubs are making when they’re breaching financial fair play at £39million loss over a three-year period, that’s a stark problem, we’re lucky that we’re not included in that bag.
“It doesn’t solve the cash problem, so going forward, the best news in some ways, is if you just purely look at it from a competitive point of view, which I don’t like to do for this reason, but when we come out of this, we’ll be incredibly strong, we’ll be nimble and fleet of foot.
“We won’t have as much debt as anyone else, we should be really raring to go more than any other club, recruitment is going to become a major part of that as well, with clubs like ours are quick to the market, making quick decisions.
“It should play to our hands competitively, but this is going to harm football, so really ahead of Luton Town Football club, the real chief concern for us is that we’ve got a healthy competition to play in.”
Sweet has previous said that it’s a ‘necessity’ that the Premier League clubs dip into their cash reserves of £1.5billion to help out struggling clubs further down the pyramid.
Explaining his view further, the Luton chief said: “Let’s talk about what happens as a society. Those that are privileged have to help the unprivileged. Those that have got resources at the moment, whether they’re cash resources, or resources of time, or whatever it may be, if there’s any way those resources can be used to help one another at the moment, it is now.
“There’s no point in wealthy individuals or big businesses holding on to cash and counting their interest right now if, actually, what they’re going to be doing is prolonging the problem, or actually constraining business, or holding business back and the people they need to trade with, when things do get back to a sense of normality. There’s no point in that. That’s the same in football.”
