Hatters CEO believes Town can exit coronavirus crisis in an ‘incredibly strong’ position

Luton Town are on course to exit the current coronavirus crisis in a far better position than their fellow Championship clubs according to chief executive Gary Sweet.

With the Hatters’ finances being run prudently by the 2020 board ever since they took over back in 2008, it means that despite being hit hard in the pocket by the season being suspended and potentially cancelled, they won’t be affected as badly as some of their rivals.

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 a 39 million loss over a three year period, that’s a stark problem.

“We’re lucky that we’re not included in that bag.

“So 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, 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 who are quick to the market, make 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 chief concern for us is that we’ve got a healthy competition to play in.”

Sweet was also hopeful of some support from the government during these increasingly difficult times for clubs, with a number possibly forced into asking their players and staff to take wage cuts just to survive.

He added: "There is some help coming from the government which we should be included in.

"We don’t really know at the moment because the announcements made last week from the government, the details of that haven’t quite yet been released and trying to get hold of somebody to help is really quite difficult.

"I think that’s the challenge for us, trying to work out what kind of positive impact that might have on us, in terms of some of the tax relief we get through PAYE and some of those lower salaries.

"It was certainly the right thing to have done, because otherwise we would be seeing mass unemployment come out of this in three months time, four months time and none of us want to see that.

"So there are some routes to assistance, but the longer this goes on then the more we’re going to need clearly.

"I think there’s a little bit of time to reflect and see what those first lines of assistance will provide us, and our objective then is to see with all of these advances of support, whether that can get us through to next season when that starts.

"At which point, some central funding and broadcast funding will become available to us and hopefully enable us to survive going forward."