The Club. Simon Akam

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      A story within a story

      In 2012-13, Premier League clubs received an average of £60m each in broadcast revenue. Clubs in the fourth tier, at Luton’s level, receive a hundredth of that amount.

      On a wet autumn Saturday I stood in a hotel lobby in Hertfordshire with David Richardson, the fitness coach of Luton Town football club. We were in Stevenage, 30 miles north of London. Outside, rain drummed the pavements and the hotel’s bilious green exterior signage.

      Richardson is 46; he has dark hair and a slightly melancholic face. Behind us a hoarding advertised the Inn’s £2,500 wedding package. In front the players lounged on upholstered wooden rectangles in Fila tracksuits. The atmosphere mixed the electric and the everyday. There were men here – seniors like Luke Guttridge, a bullet-headed 32-year-old – with several hundred league appearances to their credit. Another man, a 24-year-old ex-builder called Charlie Walker, would today make his first ever appearance in professional football.

      The match scheduled for the afternoon, a 3pm fixture against local rivals Stevenage, was important for all these men, but their familiarity with what they were about to do varied dramatically. Between Guttridge and Walker lay countless layers of experience, expectation and pressure. There were places in the team to be chased or consolidated, scouts and managers to impress or convince. The players negotiated these feelings with downcast eyes; they thumbed smartphones. Against a window a 24-year-old striker called Alex Wall sat with Beats by Dre headphones clamped over slicked down hair.

      Earlier the squad had filed into a side room for a light buffet of peas, sweet potatoes, and chicken. Usually now Richardson would take them for a walk, a final stroll to loosen muscles before the running began. But it was raining. Richardson was not keen; the players would get wet, they would sit in damp clothes for the short drive to the ground. Morale could suffer. He cancelled.

      “Professional football,” Richardson quipped to me, surveying his charges. “It would be the same at Man United.”

      On this day, Saturday 4 October 2014, Luton Town sat precisely 71 places below Manchester United in the pantheon of English football. Their entire annual pre-bonus wage bill, around £1.25m, would sustain Manchester United’s star striker Wayne Rooney for just over four weeks.

      I had come here because I had heard the good times were rolling. My point of departure was a chance conversation with a young man in London, a former schoolboy footballer. He had secured a scholarship to an American university, based partly on his sporting achievements. Later, he said, he wanted to come back and play football at the bottom of the English professional game. He knew already he was not good enough to play higher; the top flight was unobtainable. He thought much further down could be an achievable goal.

      Money was the reason. It was now possible, he suggested, to make serious pay down there. Not the massive lucre of the top of football, the headline grabbing wages of tens of thousands of pounds per week. But still decent remuneration: he thought £50,000 per year was possible in the fourth tier, the lowest professional rung, £75,000 perhaps. Maybe even £100,000. One hundred thousand pounds for playing in the sporting netherworld. I wanted to see if he was right.

      I was fascinated because it seemed a story within a story; an unknown truth folded into well-known reality. In the past 20 years broadcast money poured into the top of English football. In 1992 the top English clubs broke away from the long-established football league to form a new entity, the “Premiership.” (Originally 22 teams strong, the Premiership later reduced to 20 teams). The move allowed them to capitalise on the new technology of pay-per-view television. British Sky Broadcasting bought the rights to 60 live matches per year (the BBC got highlights) in a five-year deal worth £191.5m. That figure seemed staggering at the time but would massively increase in due course. Come 2012, a new three-year Premiership deal, split between Sky and BT, was worth over £3bn. In the 1991-2 season the combined revenue of top flight English football clubs was £170m, of which only 9% came from broadcasting. By 2012-13 that figure