Luton Town players are facing the prospect of pay cuts as the club tries to limit the damage of the Coronavirus shutdown of English football, chief executive Gary Sweet has revealed.
An initial three-week suspension of all matches has already been extended to April 30 at the earliest, but many are expecting that to be extended further after the Football Association approved an indefinite end to the season, beyond the usual June 1 finish date.
The EFL has already announced a £50million support package, with clubs receiving expected money earlier than usual to help them with their cashflow issues, as teams face an unknown period with no match-day income.
The government has also announced a support package for business and employed workers, promising to pay 80 per cent of salaries for anyone that is unable to work, with the whole country now told to stay at home to help halt the spread of the infectious disease.
Hatters chief Sweet, who believes clubs from the Premier League down to League Two will go to the wall as a result of the pandemic, has revealed that the club’s stars won’t be exempt from cost-cutting measures.
“It has to be,” he said of the prospect of pay cuts, adding: “I feel sorry for our players because they’re not the heaviest earners in the Championship, by any means. But I think everybody – myself included, all the way down – everybody’s got to contribute to this situation.
“We all have to dig in and dig deep in various ways, whether that’s with cash or time or resources or some form of commitment. Everybody’s got to pull together in order to make sure that those frontline services can operate, those elderly people are being looked after and all those vulnerable people are taken care of.
“I think it’s fundamental that, when industry stops almost in its tracks, like it does now, it’s quite clear that, due to no fault of our own, companies like ourselves, and many out there, companies like ourselves simply cannot afford to function. So there has to be some compromise from a lot of people, from within our organisation and all others.
“I’m pretty sure there will be other clubs that will be asking their players and the PFA to help before we will, and probably to a much greater degree than we will, because previously we’ve spent sensibly.”
Indeed, since Sweet made those comments, Birmingham City were yesterday the first English club to ask players to take a wage deferrals, with those earning more than £6,000 per week asked to accept a 50 per cent pay cut for the next four months.
While Town already operate with a pay cap, where £6,000 per week is nearer to their top bracket of earners, the Luton supremo said: “I’ve spoken to a core group of our squad and been very transparent with them, along with one or two other members of staff, and we have said to them, ‘Look, there is going to come a day when actually footballers may be asked to help in this situation, because this is something that is much more catastrophic than just a football club, or its staff. This is actually about protection of the football industry’.
“If footballers actually want a career, going forward, there are going to have to be some compromises by them and certainly their agents and other people within the business in order to protect it.”
But it’s not just Town players that could be affected by the pandemic, with staff already asked to work from home where possible and operations scaled back in a bid to prevent redundancies.
“We want to avoid that at all costs,” said Sweet, adding: “Effectively, what we’re doing is really trying to treat this period a bit like a pre-season and prepare for when we return, in the same way we would in pre-season.
“We have to lower our cost base during that period, which we do, and we’re trying to not to do anything beyond that at this stage.”
