Luton Town FC - Leadership, Data & Recruitment

Many of you will be aware that, despite living in Ireland, I am a long-standing fan of Luton Town Football Club . The first game I went to was the Ricky Hill testimonial in April 1986 and from then I was hooked. With my dad getting me a season ticket for the 86-87 season in the Oak Road end and experiencing the glory years for the Town as we regularly mixed it with the big boys on the Plastic Pitch at Kenilworth Road, with 4-1 and 3-0 victories against Dalglish’s Liverpool team in the league and FA Cup being particularly vivid memories.

We reached our peak under the management of Ray Harford in 1988 as we defeated Arsenal 3-2 in a memorable League Cup final, which saw us coming back from 2-1 down to score twice in the last 10 minutes following a penalty save from Andy Dibble to take the Cup back to Luton.

However, that was as good as it got for the Hatters as we slid into a long decline over the following seasons. Although we stayed up on the final day of the season in 1989-90 with an improbable away win at Derby County, we dropped out of the top flight with a final-day away defeat to already relegated Notts County in May 1992.

Over the following decade we slid all the way into the fourth flight of English football, all whilst the club suffered from a series of dubious chairmen. The phone vote under John Guiney’s tenure to appoint Mike Newell as Manager was a particularly embarrassing episode! ?

We had a brief resurgence in the early 00’s under Joe Kinnear and the phone vote appointed Mike Newell, who took us back to the Championship. However, the irregularities finally caught up with us with successive relegations back to the fourth tier, culminating with a massive point deduction of minus 30 points in the 2008-09 season.

With very limited finances, club legend Mick Harford took on the role of first-team manager and, despite leading us to the Football League Trophy with another 3-2 victory at Wembley, this time against Scunthorpe, the points deduction proved too big a mountain for Mick to climb. Ultimately, we were relegated to the conference and non-league football.

However, this adversity was the catalyst that led to the rebirth of the club. In the summer of 2008, new Managing Director Gary Sweet and LTFC2020 (named with the goal of getting Luton Town back into the Championship by 2020) took over the club.

It was to be a tough five seasons in non-league football as we went through a series of managers until finally we found the right fit in seasoned lower division manager John Still, whose down to earth and pragmatic philosophy of “controlling the controllables” led us back into the football league as Champions in 2014. All of the time, the club was being financially managed within its means.

However by December 2015, we were beginning to stagnate, and the board made the difficult decision to replace John Still. Like all Luton fans, we will forever have our gratitude for what he achieved but it was time for fresh blood with the board appointing an up-and-coming coach Nathan Jones from Brighton and Hove Albion.

The appointment of Nathan Jones as Manager, with Mick Harford taking on the role of Chief Recruitment Officer at the same time, created the platform for the success that the club has enjoyed over the last six years. At this point, we have to exchange a nod with premier league club Brentford FC which gave the club the model for consistent and sustainable improvement.

The recruitment strategy went in a very different direction, using Data as a key criterion in the decision-making process about the acquisition of new players. The club introduced a policy of buying for potential, whether that was a young player who we could develop and sell at a higher price to be a sustainable club, or bringing in a player who was out of contract and fitted into the system.

In Nathan’s first season we finished 11th in League Two, the following year we improved to 4th and lost in the playoff semi-finals to Blackpool, and in the following season, we made no mistake going up automatically with a 2nd place finish. In each season we replenished the squad, making incremental improvements as players left and new ones joined.

Luton started the first half of the 18/19 season very strongly and were competing at the top of the League One table, with another promotion looking very probable. However, in January 2019 the club was dealt a blow as Jones resigned to join recently relegated former Premier League side Stoke City, having been handed a huge wage increase and budget with the aim of restoring the Potters to their former glory. Clearly like most of us, the offer for Nathan to move to an employer with more resources and at least trebling his salary was too good to turn down. However, whilst at Stoke, he discovered how a toxic culture can impact your ability to be happy and successful. We will come back to that later…

Luton legend Mick Harford once again took the reins, this time on an interim basis, and rather than see a collapse in form, he steadied the ship and led us to the League One title and back to the Championship for the first time since 2007. With Mick being the manager when Luton were relegated from the Football League, this felt like justice and the completion of the journey for the big man. Personally, for him, it might have felt like vindication for what happened in 2009, but the fans always knew that keeping the club in the league then was an almost impossible task.

The board took their time in making an appointment and announced Graeme Jones as the new Manager in May 2019. On paper Jones had an impressive CV, having worked as Assistant Manager to Robert Martinez at Swansea and as part of the Belgium national team setup. Things started relatively brightly under Jones with an entertaining 3-3 draw on the opening day of the season against Middlesborough, and with six games played Luton had a relatively healthy seven points. As the season progressed, Luton found it increasingly difficult to amass points and lacked resilience when going behind. A group of players that looked confident and played with vibrancy under Harford looked shot under Jones as he repeatedly and publicly stated on the record that the players weren’t good enough to operate at this level.

However, it turned out that it was not the players that weren’t good enough; indeed, it was Graeme Jones who was struggling to make the transition from number two to Manager. Against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, the board very bravely decided to part company with him in April 2020.

Whilst Graeme Jones was in situ as Luton Manager, Nathan Jones was suffering from a similar fate at Stoke City as he struggled to get former Premier League players to buy into his vision and elicit the cultural change required to turn the club around. Indeed, Peter Crouch on his podcast alludes to the toxic environment that existed at Stoke that led to their demise and subsequent troubles.

Against a setting of a potential fan backlash for the way that Nathan left the club, Mick Harford and the board could see that the best option for keeping the club in the division and moving forward was to speak to Nathan about a return as Manager. And so it became in May 2019, with the club rooted in 23rd place in the Championship and odds on for relegation back to League One, that Nathan returned as Manager.

The impact was immediate as he addressed the psychological damage created by Graeme Jones’s negativity and restored belief in the camp that the team could indeed perform the “great escape”. With nine games remaining, Jones led the team to four wins, four draws, and only one defeat, with a 3-2 win on the final day of the season to secure a comfortable 19th place finish.

Over the last two seasons, Luton have kicked on with their extensive scouting network and data-led approach to player acquisition, and have improved the team and final table positions in each subsequent season. New signings often comment that the key element in their decision-making process to join Luton over other higher profile clubs is the presentation that Nathan gives when closing the deal which explains exactly how they will fit into the team and the Club’s vision.

After a 12th place finish in 2020/21 with a total of 62 points and a 6th placed finish in 2021/22 with a points tally of 75 and a narrow loss with an injury-hit side to Huddersfield in the playoff Semi-finals, could 2022/23 be the year that this fantastically run football club from Bedfordshire returns to the top flight for the first time in over 30 years? Things look bright as progress continues on our move away from Kenilworth Road to a new 17,500 all seater stadium in Powerscourt. I am excited to see what the curtain raiser against Birmingham City on 30th July brings…

In conclusion, for me Luton Town FC is an excellent study of clear Executive leadership, strong management, a data-centric approach to decision making, and superb recruitment processes. What could your business learn that sees you move from 5th tier to Premier League?