On a recent Thursday, after practice, Pelly Ruddock Mpanzu, a central midfielder for Luton Town Football Club, sat in the team’s “boot room,” opposite a kaleidoscope of brightly colored footwear hung on numbered racks. Mpanzu, who is twenty-nine, wore flip-flops over white socks and recalled the decision to come to Luton, nearly a decade before. “I’ll be honest—I didn’t want to go,” he said. His enormous quadriceps showed beneath rolled-up shorts. Prior to Luton, he’d had a stint with an upper-echelon club in London: West Ham United. “When you’re at a Premier League team, and you go to a team that’s non-league at the time?” he said. “It’s tough. Let’s be real.”
The many tiers of English soccer form a complicated pyramid. Exact figures are hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that beyond the top four leagues there are fifty-seven further leagues, featuring eighty-four total divisions. The teams that play in these lower tiers are referred to, somewhat confusingly, as “non-league” teams. They are all connected by a system of promotion and relegation—in theory, any team from the bottom could, in the course of several years, progress to the top. In practice, this almost never happens. At the summit of the pyramid, in the Premier League, players make, on average, about three and a half million pounds—the top stars earn several times as much—and the typical game is attended by about forty thousand fans. In the fifth tier, where rosters of fully professional players start to give way to part-timers, players generally make fifty to eighty thousand pounds, and the usual crowd size is about three thousand people.
Luton is in the Premier League now; hence the fancy boot room. Hence, also, the seventeen-acre training ground where practice had been held—which includes both grass and artificial pitches, and a cavernous indoor fitness facility. (It was once the sports facility of the car manufacturer Vauxhall.) But, when Mpanzu joined the team, Luton was in the fifth tier. This year, he became the first player in English soccer ever to rise with the same club from non-league to the Premier League, the world’s most storied domestic competition. “I feel I completed football,” he quipped at the end of last season, after Luton secured its promotion.
The town of Luton is a former industrial settlement with a large South Asian community. In the nineteen-eighties and early nineties, Luton Town F.C. spent ten seasons in the old First Division, then the top of English football. But in 1992, the year the Premier League was established, Luton was relegated to the division below. Then the team fell much, much further. Those were tough years. In 2004, Luton was voted “Britain’s crappiest town.” By 2014, its principal soccer team was holding its practices in a public park traversed by dog walkers; portacabins served as the team’s changing rooms and offices. And that was after a promotion to the fourth tier, or League Two, as it is somewhat confusingly known. (The previous season, Mpanzu’s first with the team, Luton was the champion of the fifth tier, then called the Skrill Conference Premier, for the payments platform that briefly sponsored it.)
As it happens, I spent a lot of time with the team that year, for a story about the bottom of English pro soccer. I attended matches and training sessions; I visited players at home. I accompanied two teammates on an expedition to buy skinny jeans, to get a sense of how famous they were. Nobody seemed to recognize them. The squad’s most visible member was a heavyset defender named Steve McNulty, whom fans called Sumo; a photograph of him jumping for a ball, with his belly tumbling between his shirt and shorts, went mildly viral. “You won’t believe that Steve McNulty is actually a brilliant footballer,” a headline in Metro declared.
At the time, the team’s medical staff consisted of one man, Simon Parsell. He treated his charges as they lay on children’s towels he’d brought from home—some of them emblazoned with Scooby-Doo or Daffy Duck—and lamented that the club couldn’t afford a single decent ice compression machine. One day, a young sports scientist working for Luton’s fitness coach demonstrated a system that tracked players’ movements to the team’s old-school manager, John Still, the man who first signed Mpanzu. “I’m looking at the person that run the most there?” Still said, skeptical that the system had accurately identified who on the team covered the most ground. “I must have watched another game, then.” He added, of the player at the top of the tracker’s results, “It must be he’s doctored that fucking system.” (Luton’s current manager, Rob Edwards, recently described the team’s play this year like so: “Our total distance in a game has gone up around four per cent. Explosive effort has gone up around five per cent or six per cent; high-speed running has gone up five per cent or six per cent. Sprint has gone up twenty-one per cent.”)
Four years later, under Nathan Jones, who replaced Still as manager, the team finished second in League Two and was promoted to League One. By December, 2017, Luton was the highest-scoring team in the country—the forward James Collins finished the season with twenty-five goals—and subsequently earned another promotion. Finally, last season, after prevailing in a playoff penalty shoot-out against Coventry, they earned a spot in the Premier League for the first time.
Mpanzu is in a WhatsApp group with Luton players from his early days. “We were a tight clique,” he said. The group includes Alex Wall, who now plays for Dartford, a semi-professional club in the sixth tier, and Jake Howells, who, post-Luton, played at Hemel Hempstead Town, another semi-pro outfit. A fourth group member, Matthew Robinson, currently plays with Boreham Wood, in the fifth tier, but has arguably had greater success in music; he raps under the name Kamakaze, and his song “Last Night” was featured on the soundtrack for the soccer video game FIFA 20. (Back in 2014, he told me that he was the best rapper in the league.)
Off the field, there are other survivors. Simon Parsell is now the head of the team’s medical staff, which includes a full-time doctor, plus three top-flight ice compression machines and uniformly gray towels. “Pinch me,” he said, when I asked him how things felt now. “Who would have thought Luton Town could be in the Premier League? It’s mad.”
Luton has taken a battering this season, losing its first four Premier League games, including a 4–1 drubbing at Brighton. The commentator and former England player Alan Shearer blasted the team as “naïve.” Later, though, Luton managed a draw with Wolverhampton Wanderers, which have bounced between the Premier League and the second tier for most of the past two decades. Then it defeated Everton, a team that, though it’s had some rough seasons lately, hasn’t been relegated since 1951. Luton kept things close against the league’s top team, Tottenham, but lost, 1–0. Aston Villa defeated them, too, but they managed a 1-1 draw at Liverpool. If the season ended today, Luton Town would be on the cusp of relegation back to the second tier. There’s still a long way to go, however.
“The Premier League is a tough, tough league,” Mpanzu said in the boot room. “Speed of the play—you can’t make too many mistakes, because you can get punished very, very easily.” He mentioned an error he’d made against Brighton, a failure to clear the ball. “I juggled with the ball in the box, and immediately they scored,” he said. Luton lost that game, 4–1.
I asked Mpanzu about his ambitions. “First and foremost,” he told me, he wanted Luton to stay in the Premier League. “Took me ten years to get here,” he said. “So, if we was to go down, it would be heartbreaking.” Second, he hoped to play in as many games as he could—and maybe score a goal. “Be nice to get a goal and score in all the divisions,” he said. “But that’s just a personal point.” What really mattered, he added, was the success of the team. ♦
