Sweet declares play-off final victory could be worth £100m to the Hatters

Luton CEO Gary Sweet has revealed that promotion to the Premier League could well boost the club and the town to the tune of around £100m.

The Hatters are 90 minutes away from finding out just how much they could pocket, as they look to seal a place in the top flight for the first time since 1992 when facing Coventry City in the play-off final at Wembley on Saturday.

With the Premier League one of, if not, the richest and most-watched leagues in the world, the financial rewards in the modern day are now vast compared to those when Town were last there some 30 years ago.

Asked just how much a victory could mean to Luton’s coffers, Sweet said: “There’s two economic impacts.

“There is one which is directly upon the club and I think everybody in the room knows roughly what this game means to Luton Town Football Club.

“It is called the richest club game in the world and it has that impact.

“Of course we stand at a slight disadvantage to many on that because we have a few million to spend on this old girl here and we’ve got a new stadium moving to.

“To the town there are no specific studies but it is dozens of millions, perhaps over 100 million.

“I think Brighton have produced a study on the annual impact and being in the Premier League and a new stadium together has been over £500m to the town, to the locality, so with Premier League action and Power Court, why should we think any different?”

Discussing just what it will mean for the town to actually host a Premier League club, Sweet continued: “We are, all the shareholders of Luton Town Football Club, are local.

"Maybe not now, but we are from Luton and Bedfordshire.

"We came into this project 15 years ago in order to try and make a difference to Luton and the locality, that is one of the key objectives we had.

"Our involvement in the community, our involvement in inclusion of supporters in some decision making, our partnerships with stakeholders, like the council, the airport and the university.

"Those key partners in town who drive the economic growth of the town and drive the spirit of the town and also to try and shape the culture a little bit which I think we are doing.

"I think we are making a difference but also from a charitable point of view, what we’re doing with our community trust and our engagements from that point of view so that is our starting point to some extent.

"What the club does is make that more impactful and easier to deliver, so for us this means everything.

"It is a huge challenge, it’s a huge task, it will be a huge accomplishment.

"We absolutely recognise the size and the scale of it, we’re more than happy to take it on, we’re more than happy to embrace it.

"We will use every single ounce of what that can deliver for us to enhance those engagements we’ve got and to try and change the face of Luton a little bit.

"It is a good town, it has got a great beating heart and soul, people don’t recognise that from the outside.”

Despite such a massive financial reward dangling in front of both clubs on the day, Sweet isn’t letting himself think too far ahead, knowing that nothing has been achieved at this moment in time.

Although he would let his hair down for a few hours should Town come out on top, it would be a swift return to what he described as the ‘clinical’ business of running what will then be a top flight club once the party has finished.

The CEO added: “It is a normal game for us.

"For me it is a normal game, I mean of course it isn’t, it is at Wembley in front of a packed stadium and it is going to play out differently but for us we remain failures until we become winners.

"It is only a great achievement if you win it, otherwise it is a league game and we play another league game in the Championship next August if we don’t win it, it is normal.

“It is business, right now it is business.

"Saturday night it might be a bit more than business.

"We’ll give ourselves probably six hours to enjoy ourselves, six hours to recover and then we’ll get going, but until Saturday night it is purely business.

"The one thing here is we are all supporters of the club, all the shareholders, we see it as a custodianship, we see it as we are looking after something.

"There is a tradition, there is a heritage in this football club.

“This will live a lot longer than we are, so from our perspective we look at this as while we are supporters, purely clinically, we have to make clinical business decisions.

"One part of why we have got the culture we have got, one part of why we have accelerated this quickly is because we can’t involve ourselves as supporters in decisions about players or stadiums, or anything.

"It has to be run as a business.”