‘We’re going to be hit quite severely by this’ – Sweet reveals Luton’s Coronavirus cash cost

The financial damage to Luton Town of the Coronavirus football shutdown will stretch into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, chief executive Gary Sweet has revealed.

A total suspension of matches for three weeks, has this morning been announced by the EFL, in response to the growing pandemic crisis of the Covid-19 disease spreading.

While the UK Government yesterday advised that there was no need for sporting events to be cancelled, the three football governing bodies – the Premier League, EFL and Football Association – took decisive action this morning, having originally followed the advice of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

It means the Hatters’ home game against Preston North End and away ties at Swansea City and Leeds United are postponed and, immediately, means the club will gain no match-day revenue tomorrow from what would have been a home Championship clash against Preston.

There are already whispers, nationally, that the suspension could get extended further beyond the April 3 date currently be muted as date for the reinstation of fixtures, something Sweet thinks could happen, based of Government advice about the peak of the disease being up to 14 weeks away.

Asked how much the suspension of football will cost Luton, Sweet said: “It’s really difficult at this stage but it will extend into the hundreds of thousands (of pounds), just in a relatively short period.

“We’ll have to deal with that, and I say take it on the chin, but we may well utilise players differently, to try to increase our income in some form. And try to create some schemes where we’re still keeping that community of Luton going.

“Clearly, we’re going to be hit quite severely by this, but what is our alternative at this stage? Every other club is going to be hit quite severely too.”

Sweet has already called on the Premier League to utilise a £1.5billion cash reserve, to help out clubs further down the football pyramid and he added to that, saying: “There is a little bank that we’ve got within the football family, that should be potential releasing, or extending an arm of assistance to clubs lower down the food chain.

“How that would be distributed, I don’t know. The first hurdle there is to get them (the Premier League clubs) to recognise and maybe look below where they are in the table, to be able to recognise that this is a problem.

“Trust me, if football clubs down the chain suffer severely, catastrophically from this then the Premier League will absolutely suffer.

“Whether that’s purely by the fact that football itself will become fractured, but actually through reputation. The repetitional damage if they didn’t act charitably, I think, would be awful. So, that’s our view.”

The announcement this morning from the EFL, about suspending all football for three weeks, came in spite of the advice from the UK Government, which Sweet disagrees with.

“I think it was the right decision to make, absolutely,” the Hatters supremo said of the EFL’s decision to suspend matches.

“I think it was an error judgement by central government yesterday not to give the assistance to the Premier League and the Football League to be able to take that decision yesterday, which I think everyone was expecting to do, and I think a temporary pause is absolutely the right decision to make.

“Prior to that decision, our Luton Cobra team met early this morning to actually discuss how we were going to manage the game on Saturday.

“We had broadly come to the conclusion, as actually I wrote to the Football League, to suggest that with the number of people that we had isolated, not because they’d got it, but they were either showing some form of symptoms just from the government advice yesterday, or they’d visited various countries or whatever, had family members, to postpone the game, as we couldn’t fulfil the stadium safety criteria.

“Either that or a partial closure, where we closed half of the stadium, all of the internal areas where there would be a higher risk of contagion.

“So we were kind of taking those steps unilaterally rather than allowing it to be led by the Football League.

“Our responsibility is to our people and our staff and our supporters, it’s not led by an authority that maybe doesn’t understand the issues we face.”