Hatters CEO reveals early postponement of Burnley clash was to avoid Premier League sanctions

Luton CEO Gary Sweet has stated that Town took the early decision to rearrange their first home match of the Premier League season against Burnley to avoid receiving any sanctions from the Premier League, even if it is met with criticism from those outside of Kenilworth Road.

After reaching the top flight following their penalty shootout victory over Coventry City at Wembley in the Championship play-off final, it means that the Hatter will be competing in the highest tier of English football once more this term.

Although their 118-year-old stadium has hosted top flight football for a good number of years in the past, in order to make sure it is ready to showcase the Premier League product to a global audience, Luton are having to spend over £12m to completely rebuild the Bobbers Stand and house all the media requirements that are now needed in a period of under 14 weeks.

With the Hatters’ first game away to Brighton & Hove Albion, they were due to entertain Burnley on Saturday, August 19, but the club announced last week that match has now been postponed just in case there were any last minute hitches, which would have seen them unable to host the contest.

Had that been the case, they could have been hit with a punishment, which when speaking to TalkSPORT on Saturday, was exactly what they didn’t want, as Sweet explained: “The postponement really is effectively about supporters.

“The Premier League have effectively got an agreement with the Football Supporters Federation and supporters in general that they will give a six week notice period for any postponements or any changes to the fixture calendar, so we were under a little bit of pressure.

“We have to either give a cast iron guarantee that Kenilworth Road will be ready for that game and if it a later stage we found that there were subsequent problems, we technically could be under some kind of sanction from the Premier League.

"We want to avoid that of course, so we just took the sensible decision.

“If you look at the cranes that we’ve had rock up (on the pitch), we've got really high winds, but we're paying 20 grand a day for these cranes and they can't do anything because the winds are high.

"So that's a couple of days of a slight delay, and whilst we're ahead of schedule, there are some things that are going to go on which actually could risk that particular date.

"We don't think so, but could and we just didn't want to take that risk.

"If this was the Football League and no disrespect to the Football League, we’d have cracked on and played it.

"First of all we wouldn’t have been doing this work, but being in the Premier League just means the eyes of the world are upon you a little bit more.

"We’ve got to be conscious of what decisions we make and be a little bit more responsible for those.

“I think it was a responsible and a responsible decision in the end, and one that I thank Burnley for, and I thank everybody involved for, people like building control and our safety advisory group, who also want some clarity, so for those reasons I think it was the right call.

“You look at this type of project, you’d normally need half a year to deliver it, let alone a quarter of a year.

"Bear in mind we actually had the opportunity to get promoted last season, so we started the thought process 18 months ago.

"When it came to it and we got promoted, we kind of had a really good plan of how we could deliver this in 14 weeks with no contingency, I have to say, and now we're ahead of schedule.

“We're in a really fortunate position because we're actually developing and starting to build, very soon, our new stadium, we actually have pretty much on tap architects, cost consultants, surveyors, structural engineers.

"We’ve got all of that on tap, and we’re in a really good position where we’re advising the Premier League what we could deliver.

"So we are trying to deliver the impossible, far more than any other club has ever done.

"It is a gargantuan task that we're trying to achieve, but we will deliver it, and that’s why I apologise to supporters for the postponement.

"I know we’ll get some criticism for it, we’ll take that on the chin as at the end of the day it’s the right call and we'll have a great stadium for the opener against West Ham on the first.”

Sweet did admit the chance to chance to switch the fixture and go to Burnley on the Saturday instead, with the return leg at at Kenilworth Road on January 13 had been discussed, but eventually decided against,

He continued: “It was an option, if the shoe was on the other foot, I probably wouldn't want to come to Kenilworth Road in the middle of January, but really, sensibly, we just wanted to keep the calendar as it was.

“We’ve got an opportunity where the international break isn't too far away (weekend of September 9/10), so it will be played just after that we think.

"We've got to find the date, but we’re sorting that out with the Premier League and UEFA need to be involved in that too.

“We don't think we're going to be delayed too long so it's not like we’re going to be fighting to catch up.

"There aren’t a lot of teams available (for free weekend), but we’ll manage it in the right way.

"We will make sure that we make the most of that weekend and football matches do get postponed because of weather on a late occasion.

"We have been used to this in the past, so it’s not a massive conundrum for us to fix.”

Meanwhile, giving an update on just how the ground is looking with under a month to go until the start of the new campaign, Sweet added: “It's complete chaos at the moment, we've had to do an awful lot to our 118 year old football stadium.

“We've got to recognise that Kenilworth Road wasn’t necessarily built back then for Premier League football today, so we've pretty much got to rebuild one small stand along the entire length of what most people know as the beach huts.

"It’s all the executive boxes, we’ve had to move them out, evict them and effectively replace it with what is a giant TV gantry along that side to hold all the camera positions, VAR, data, journalists, some interview places, plus also build a studio and a canteen for the media staff.

"We’ve had to put in about five, six spot interview rooms behind the dressing rooms, which if anyone has been down in that area of Kenilworth Road will know that space is very limited.

"So pretty much a lot of those are cupboards, but they’re really nice cupboards now.

"We’re cracking on, we are actually ahead of schedule on all these works and I’ve just been watching our CCTV where two 20 tonne cranes have just rocked up on to our pitch to effectively start putting the gantry up, so it’s all good.

"We've got less than three months to do this.

"This will really come in two phases, there’s a whole load of mandatory improvements that are quite complex that we need to deliver first, and then there's a whole load of desirable things, some of which will get done straight away, some of which will need to wait or be done during the course of the beginning of the season.

"It's a complicated environment, we’ve got 25 houses at the back of that (away) stand, so we're in discussion with the community.

"We’ve got a great relationship with the community, we’re upsetting them a little bit at the moment as the roads have been closed all the time because of the delivery vans but they’ve been fantastic and everyone's been behind us locally.”