For the first time in 14 games, Luton Town have won a football match

Perhaps the 2-0 defeat at Watford a week earlier was the boot up the backside that a struggling team needed. It's certainly come just in time for new manager Matt Bloomfield.

At last, a win. Luton Town played Portsmouth at Kenilworth Road on Saturday afternoon and for the first time in 2025, on the first day of March, the home team won. This has been a miserable run of results for the club. Their last win of any form had come on the 20th December, 2-1 against Derby County, and slightly fortunate to get that with a stoppage-time winner.

Since then thirteen games had come to pass, twelve in the League and one in the FA Cup. The Cup defeat wasn’t too much of a surprise, beaten 2-0 at Nottingham Forest in the Third Round. If anything, that was a respectable result against a team who were, no matter how surprising this is, third in the Premier League at the time the game was played and who remain in that position today.

But those twelve League games had been wretched. Seven of their nine defeats throughout it had only been by one goal, while the other two had only been by two. One of those—the last one, as things turned out—came away to local rivals Watford. They only took three points from three draws during this run, and in two of those games they took the lead before being pegged back, while the other was a goalless draw. The Portsmouth win put them within two points of fourth-bottom Hull City.

Of course, this time last year Luton Town were a Premier League club. This much was highly surprising. Just a decade earlier they’d been a non-league club, winning the National League title to end a five-year exile from the EFL. Just to be in the Championship by 2019 in the first place was a massive achievement. It was their third promotion in six seasons.

But that upward trajectory glossed over something which has become quite important about Luton Town in recent years; they don’t really do mid-table. Over the last twenty years, they have finished in the middle—8th to 16th, for a 24 team division, which has been the case for all bar one of those twenty years—of whichever division they’ve been in four times. They have been both promoted and relegated more often that this, five times each.

There are reasons for this. The savage treatment of the club at the hands of the FA over financial mismanagement by previous owners of the club was—and remains—a disgrace, and it’s the resurgence from this which is the most notable aspect of it all. And at the other end of the spectrum the club was clearly too ‘big’ for the National League and arguably higher, according to your taste. The question of where Luton fit feels like a fair one to ask, when they’ve played in five different divisions in the last eleven years.

The reasons for what happened before are well documented, but there doesn’t appear to be anything nefarious going on this time around. Planning permission for the new stadium for which the club has been crying out for decades was approved at the end of last year. This had already been delayed by the pandemic, but all of this resulted in revised plans that incorporate a slightly larger stadium than the 23,000 capacity one initially planned.

The 25,000-capacity stadium—which I suspect I may end up calling ‘The Coffee Table’—is hoped to be open for 2027, though it seems more likely that it will be the following year. That sounds a long time, but even 2028 is only three years and that doesn’t feel like too long, given the amount of time they’ve been waiting already. But if a week is a long time in politics, three years could be a long time for Luton supporters, who could be forgiven wondering what division their team might even be in by the time they move in there.

So, what is going wrong this time around? Well, there is a history of clubs who’ve gone this far falling back from whence they came pretty quickly. Bradford City were relegated from the Premier League in 2001. By 2007 they were in League Two. Swindon Town were relegated for a second season following their one season sojourn there in 1993/94, promoted back, and then struggled for three years before being relegated again into the third tier. Historically speaking no-one can match Northampton Town, who went from the Fourth Division to the First Division and back again between 1961 and 1969, an eight-year period during which they were both promoted and relegated three times. There are plenty of examples.

But okay, so that says that Luton’s current predicament isn’t unique. What's driving it, though? Well, the club’s activity in the transfer market was probably too cautious last January, while the loss of Ross Barkley, Sambi Lokonga, Chiedozie Ogbene and Gabe Osho has clearly hurt. Those players have evidently not been amply replaced.

It can also be very easy to slip into a mindset of believing that parachute payments will in and of themselves be your saviour. But they won’t. The work still has to be put in. The right players still have to be recruited. The chemistry has to be right and there needs to be a coherent plan. You can’t just wait for it to fall into your lap. Parachute payments make all of it easier, but the money still has to be spent well.

In the managerial seat, Matt Bloomfield arrived in the middle of January following the sacking of Rob Edwards. The Portsmouth win was his first as the Luton manager. Bloomfield had been successful at Wycombe Wanderers, who he’d taken to an automatic promotion place in League One, but it’s been evident since his arrival that this particular role requires significant careful handling. That first win came at his ninth attempt, and it has to represent a corner being turned if they’re to spare themselves from relegation before the end of this season.

Two massive matches are coming up. On the 11th March, Luton are away to Cardiff City, who are two places and five points above them. That’s not quite a must-win match, but it may be a must not lose one. Two and a half weeks following this match they’re back on the road again, this time to fourth-bottom Hull, and that is a match that really does look like it could be a must-win. The good news there is that Matt Bloomfield has finally got a win under his belt, and this is something that could be built upon. And with just two points separating them from Hull City, they are still in touch. With a quarter of the season left to play, it’s not a lost cause. Not yet.

The accompanying image has been released into the public domain by its author, LTFC Wellingborough, at the English Wikipedia project.