Luton, Wycombe and the harsh realities of football management

Luton Town have sacked the guy who took them into the Premier League, and Wycombe Wanderers have lost the guy who played for them for 18 years before becoming manager. That, as they say, is football.

In the end, there was a certain inevitability about it all, but all concerned will long remember that Rob Edwards had performed something approaching a miracle by getting Luton Town into the Premier League in the first place. A decade earlier, they’d been playing non-league football in the National League, yet there they were at the top table, the division that they’d voted to introduce but had never actually played in never played in after getting relegated in 1992. Their decline since then had been a mixture of drift, neglect, and outright chicanery, but somehow they’d found a way back.

Few people had been expecting Luton Town to survive a season at that exalted level, and indeed the weight of burden proved too great to bear. They conceded 85 goals in 38 games, picked up just six points from their last 16, and were eventually relegated by a comfortable six points.

But there were reasons to be reasonably sanguine about the experience. They’d finished 18th, so there was none of the ignominy associated with finishing bottom of the table. Admittedly it was 18th on a fairly pitiful 26 points, but at least they did better than Burnley or Sheffield United. They’d had brief spells outside the relegation places throughout the season. They beat Brighton 4-0 and Newcastle 1-0.

By modern criteria they certainly hadn’t embarrassed themselves, but no matter how unexpected your arrival into the Premier League might be, relegation from it will inevitably alter perceptions of what you should be achieving. The financial advantage awarded by Premier League parachute payments is so great over other teams in the Championship that you simply don’t get to play the underdog card any more. With a £40m head start over most of the division’s other teams, no-one should plan for a definite automatic return, but a better season than last time around shouldn’t be beyond anyone.

But things haven’t worked out so far this season. They started badly when, on the opening weekend of the season, Burnley won 4-1 at Kenilworth Road, a result which indicated that whatever superiority Luton may have had over them last season had flipped during the summer. There was improvement thereafter, but not by much. Luton picked up just a single point from their first four matches, and that only came from a goalless draw at Portsmouth, another club who started slowly and have remained at or near the foot of the Championship table since.

A couple of wins did follow against Millwall and Sheffield Wednesday, and there was also the emotional release of a very thorough 3-0 win against Watford in the middle of October, a result of even greater resonance than usual, given that Edwards had left Forest Green Rovers for Watford in May 2022 only to get sacked just a few weeks into his first season at Vicarage Road, in true Pozzo style. He pitched up at Kenilworth Road a couple of months later in November. Watford’s loss turned out to very much be Luton’s gain, at that time.

Luton’s results this season picked up from the start of November with a run of four wins and two draws from ten games which lifted them from 22nd—the final relegation place—up to 15th, but with four straight defeats since then dropping them back to 20th, just two points and two places above the relegation places, there was a certain inevitability about this particular axe falling. The past can only ever get you so far in a results-driven business like football, and their choice of successor tells us a lot about the nature of loyalty in modern football.

Gareth Ainsworth had spent a long time as the manager of Wycombe Wanderers before finally being tempted away by a better offer, in his case from Queens Park Rangers in February 2023. Just as with Edwards and Watford, that hadn’t worked out either and he was sacked at the end of the following October.

But at least Wycombe seemed to call the decision of his replacement right. Matt Bloomfield had played 558 games for Wycombe over 18 seasons between 2003 and 2021. He’d captained the team when they were promoted to the Championship—the first time the club had ever played at that level—at Wembley in 2020. He’d spent the first few months of the 2022/23 season as the head coach at Colchester United but when Wycombe came calling upon Ainsworth’s departure it must have felt like something of a no-brainer for the manager to return to Buckinghamshire.

Wycombe finished in League One’s upper mid-table in 2023 and 2024, but this season has seen them power their way towards the top of the table. They’re currently second behind Birmingham City, level on points with the now lavishly-funded Wrexham. They remain underdogs for automatic promotion out of those three, but have now been in one of those two automatic promotion places every week bar one since the end of October.

It was inevitable that there would be substantial interest in Bloomfield from other clubs as a result of this. A manager achieving results while not spending wildly will always pique the interest of club owners who very much enjoy the former while very much not enjoying the latter. Whether Wycombe can maintain their gravity suspension in the light of such a sudden feeling of deflation is at least open to question, but whoever his replacement turns out to be will at least have been handed a squad in fine shape.

Having played for the club for so long, did Wycombe supporters have a right to a greater degree of loyalty from Bloomfield? Probably not. No-one needs telling about the extent to which professional football is a cut-throat business in which all managers need to be winning all matches all the time. To say that job security is tenuous would be one of the understatements of the century, and from the manager’s perspective your next contract could always be your last. It will always be a disappointment for fans when things go this way, but this is an inevitability in a game that has become a perpetual marketplace.

Bloomfield has his work cut out, but unlike supporters, who can cling on to past loyalties and the sunnier days of the past, those who work in the game are perpetually stuck in the present and the immediate future. What was the last result? What will the next one be? In a world in which only winning games will guarantee ongoing lucrative employment, it’s no great surprise that the loyalty displayed by him as a player couldn’t be replicated as a manager.

We shall see, whether he follows the path of Rob Edwards at Watford or Rob Edwards at Luton. It feels at least superficially strange, that Bloomfield should have chosen to go from the middle of a promotion battle to fire-fighting near the bottom of the division above, but well, that’s football. And the truth is that we all know this, whether we’re on the outside looking in or on the inside clinging on.

Edwards himself, one would imagine, will do just fine. His achievements at Kenilworth Road won’t be readily forgotten, and he was similarly successful in his position prior to that. But what went wrong this time around? Was it mere stubbornness, arrogance or merely a lack of the required imagination to find a Plan B, C or D as it became increasingly evident that Plan A wasn’t working?

There can come a point at which one can have too much self-belief, especially when it comes to systems, but Edwards is still young, at 42 years old, so there will likely be plenty of further opportunities for him. Matt Bloomfield jumps into his position at Kenilworth Road with a second successive relegation a very real possibility, for Luton Town. A canister of ABC powder and some flame-retardant clothing might be in order.

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