Sweet: Suspending season due to coronavirus outbreak was correct but it could cost Luton 'hundreds of thousands' of pounds

Luton Town chief executive Gary Sweet has admitted that the EFL’s ‘right decision’ to suspend the football season due to the coronavirus outbreak could end up costing the club hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost income.

It was announced this morning that no further football would be played until April 3 at the earliest to try and contain the spread of the virus, which means Hatters’ home game against Preston North End tomorrow has been postponed.

Matches against Swansea City and Leeds United are also off, before the international break takes place, meaning Luton will lose valuable revenue from the games not going ahead, and the three weeks of inactivity.

When asked if he knew how much it could ultimately cost, Sweet said: “It’s really difficult, at this stage, no we don’t, but it will extend into the hundreds of thousands, just in a relatively short period.

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

“But clearly we’re going to be hit quite severely by this, but what is our alternative at this stage?

“Every club is going to be hit quite severely too, but there is a little bank that we’ve kind of got within the football family (Premier League reserve fund of £1.5bn), that I think should be potentially releasing or extending an arm of assistance to clubs lower down the food chain.

“How that would be distributed, I don't know, but I think the first hurdle there is to get them to maybe even look below where they are in the table, and 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 and that’s purely by the fact football itself will become fractured but actually through reputation, the reputational damage if they didn't act charitably, I think would be awful so that's our view.”

Although naturally concerned over just how much Town’s finances are going to be hit by the postponements, Sweet did reiterate his view that no other options were feasible at this stage.

He added: “I think it was the right decision to make, absolutely.

“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.”