The Club

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Simon Akam. The Club

Contents

1. Acknowledgements

1. A story within a story

2. Match day

3. Training ground

4. Linkman

5. It’s about winning

6. Community

7. Living the dream

8. Ambition and experience

9. Battlefield analysis

10. The team ethic

11. Club mascot

12. Post-match, post-mortem

1. About the author

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I would like to thank the directors, players and staff of Luton Town Football Club, the Hatters, who twice allowed me to spend time with them during the autumn of 2014, and without whose openness and generosity this book could not have been written.

The hard work of both my Editor, Cathy Galvin, and Newsweek Insights Publisher, Sheila Bounford, was central to the completion of this project.

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I wanted to see this truth. And I wanted to see what it meant to men slogging their guts out each weekend, well below the national exposure and the fame. So I approached a slew of clubs in what is termed League Two, the fourth tier and lowest fully professional rung of English football. The nomenclature is complicated. The top flight has, since 1992, called itself the Premiership. That move made the old first division the second tier. In 2004 the first division rechristened itself the ‘Championship.’ The third tier became ‘League One.’ League Two, the next one down, is the fourth rung. The bottom of this world.

My aim was to spend a week embedded with a club, to be a “fly on their wall”. That is a major ask of any institution. The sides I approached first, teams like Hartlepool, Morecambe and Mansfield, located in northern industrial towns that I felt might symbolise the position of sport in their communities, did not wish to co-operate. Luton Town however, down in Bedfordshire outside London, were willing to let me come. As it turned out, Luton were the neatest fit imaginable.

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