The 2023/2024 Premier League season started on August 11, 2023 and will last until May 19, 2024 with 17 teams that played in the Premier League last season and 3 newly promoted teams, including the quite unique Luton Town.
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| Keniworth Road, home of Luton Town - the smallest and oldest stadium in the Premier League at 120 years old |
• FROM “NO LEVEL” TO PREMIER LEAGUE
The 17 teams playing in the Premier League in the 2022/2023 season and continuing to play in the Premier League in the 2023/2024 season in order of points ranking from highest to lowest are Manchester City, Arsenal, Manchester United, Newcastle, Liverpool, Brighton, Aston Villa, Tottenham, Brentford, Fulham, Crytal Palace, Chelsea, Wolveshampton, West Ham, Bournemoth, Nottingham Forest and Eveton.
The 3 teams that were relegated to the Championship this season are Leicester, Leeds and Southampton. Replacing these 3 relegated teams in the Premier League are 3 newly promoted teams from the Championship, including Burnley (first in the Championship), Sheffield United (second in the Championship) and Luton Town (contender), of which Burnley and Sheffield United have been promoted to the Premier League before, only Luton Town is promoted to the Premier League for the first time with many unique features.
Promotion and relegation in football seems to be a normal story, especially in a competitive tournament like the Premier League, unless the team has just won the championship and then has to suffer relegation. Football, or sports in general, depends a lot on the performance of the players, the players and the coaching staff, however, there is always something called class. Big teams always have their own class, as the famous coach of the Premier League Alex Ferguson once said "Form is temporary, class is forever", typically the teams in the top of the Premier League such as Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City... even if they play poorly in a few matches somewhere in the season, they still end up in the top. The worst in the last Premier League season was probably Chelsea - a top English team, they had to finish the season in 12th place. As for Leicester, although they won the Premier League in 2016, maybe because of their temporary form at that time that helped them win the championship, but then they did not invest enough resources to maintain their position, so they had to fall into the current relegation situation.
But Luton Town’s promotion to the Premier League this season is truly a unique story, rare in modern times. Previously, in 2016, when Leicester City won the Premier League, it created a huge shock for English football because it was like a story of “an elephant passing through the eye of a needle”. Luton Town this year is no less rare, when they were relegated to a position of no rank in English Football, immersed in amateur football, but then went straight from “no rank” to the Premier League.
Like many football teams in England, Luton Town also has a long history of playing football. Founded in 1885, this team is known as “The Hatters” because of its association with the town of Lu-ton in the Bedfordshire region of England, which specializes in making and selling hats.
However, throughout its 138 years of existence, this team has had to face its biggest rival, financial problems. Lacking money and investment, they have had to "stop playing" many times, even though they only played in the lower leagues in the English Football system. There was a time when this team reached the First Division, that was the 1982/1983 season, then went back to the Second Division and played there. In the 2008/2009 Second Division season, due to lack of financial resources, this team was deducted points, forced to go down to the Fifth Division - a division that is no longer ranked in English Football, equivalent to an amateur team.
Playing in the amateur league for 5 years, through the door of participating in the national cups where all domestic teams are allowed to compete, Luton Town found their way back to the English ranked tournaments in the 2014/2015 season and quickly rose to the Championship (second only to the Premier League) in the 2019/2020 season after 12 years of absence from this tournament.
And it didn't stop there. Luton Town's rise was meteoric. In the 2021/2022 season, they qualified for the play-offs to the Premier League but were beaten by Huddersfield Town in the semi-finals. No problem, in the 2022/2023 season, they again qualified for the play-offs in the Championship and this time they defeated both Sunderland and Coventry City in the semi-finals and final to finish third, enough to secure their first ever promotion to the Premier League.
• DIFFICULTIES
Behind the joy of their fairytale promotion to the Premier League, Luton Town will face many difficulties in this pressure-filled playground.
There is still a long financial story ahead, although Luton Town seem to have hit the jackpot with a huge amount of money beyond expectations thanks to promotion. A British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday wrote that “the club’s 138-year history has witnessed an unprecedented miracle when it played in the Premier League and received more than £200 million in three seasons”.
However, this amount of money looks very large for a small team like Luton Town but in fact it is nothing compared to the big teams in the Premier League. For example, Arsenal, after finishing second in the Premier League this season, this year, they have become the most expensive team in England when spending 255 million pounds on the player transfer market as of August 10, of which, just for the money to buy Deslan Rice from West Ham, this team spent 128 million pounds. Of course, Arsenal also sold some of their players to earn 37 million pounds. Other teams are also playing big like Tottenham spending 213 million pounds to buy players, Manchester United also spent 211 million pounds to buy players. If calculated in money, many players in big teams are more valuable than the current Luton Town team.
Luton Town manager Rob Edward said: “I know we are favourites to be relegated. Most teams promoted through the play-offs end up relegated after one season. I don’t mind what people predict, it’s just the standard they put on Luton. We are one of the smallest teams ever promoted, a team that has never been in the Premier League before. It’s like David versus Goliath. But we want to enjoy this season.”
The first thing that Luton Town need to do this Premier League season is to strengthen their squad. However, with limited resources and a high-priced player market, it is difficult for them. A possible solution for the team is to look for players with a bit of reputation but past their prime, as mid-table Premier League teams have long done.
But the biggest challenge for Luton Town is having to play and spend money to build a new stadium because the team's current stadium is very small, with exactly 10,356 seats - the smallest in the Premier League. In fact, Keniworth Road stadium where they play is a very old stadium, considered a classic with an age of about... 120 years. This stadium is associated with the ups and downs of the team's history and has not been renovated or upgraded yet, like a backyard with rows of houses surrounding it, the road to the stadium is very narrow. This team has long wanted to build a new stadium in a more convenient place in their city, but after much deliberation, they had to stop for many reasons, including lack of money.
Recently, with the continuous improvement of Luton Town, the Board of Directors of this team decided to speed up the construction of a new football stadium in the city center and the number of seats from over 10,000 at the old stadium to over 17,500 at the new stadium and can be expanded to 23,000 seats when needed. A recent decision of the Board of Directors said that the new football stadium will be increased to 19,500 seats, with 4,000 standing seats, very modest compared to the stadiums of the current big football teams in England. However, it will take more than 3 years, until 2026, for the new stadium to be completed. This means that Luton Town will still have to continue using the old stadium for a long time and this team to play in the Premier League must spend tens of millions of pounds here to upgrade the stadium, being poor and having to worry about money to build a house, which is really difficult.
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