Sweet believes 'catastrophic' coronavirus pandemic will see some Football League clubs forced out of business

Hatters chief executive Gary Sweet has warned that the 'catastrophic' coronavirus pandemic which has brought the country to a standstill will see some Football League clubs being forced out of business.

The EFL took the decision to suspend the current season until April 30 at the earliest last week, although resuming matches on that date seems optimistic at best, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson enforcing a minimal three week lockdown last night.

Although Sweet insisted Town could cope in the short-term, he believes that with no income generated by match-days, ticket sales, or other such avenues, it is going to hit them and their fellow clubs extremely hard, even those in the top flight as well.

Speaking to the press via video-link about the impact of the virus, he said: “A turning point, yes. Catastrophic, yes.

“When we resume I will guarantee you that there won’t be 72 clubs in the Football League, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not 20 in the Premier League.

“This is going to hurt some clubs very, very badly, very, very quickly.

“We are not necessarily a club that is going to be hurt this month, next month but we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure that we can get through too.

“The worst possible case scenario is that we don’t have a game all this season again, and our season is cancelled.

"We then have to get through to next season before we start bringing an income in, and that’s what we are working on at the moment.

“The plan always is to try and keep the business intact without having necessarily to lose people or resources that rely on us for their income, but that is going to be pretty difficult to achieve.”

Like most teams, Town cancelled training last week, shutting their doors at the Brache on Friday, ensuring all players and management staff remained at home.

Giving an update on what else has happened at Kenilworth Road, Sweet continued: “The club is operational as far as we can be.

"As of today, we have closed all of the physical retail outlets, we are operational online completely on the retail side.

"We have effectively closed the Ticket Office, the phones and online are active.

"In terms of the administration staff, we are all at home at the moment and working pretty efficiently, there’s a lot to do.

"There are a skeleton staff who will be working on site – people who have got repairs to do to the place, for example where because nobody is there, they are kind of isolating.

"Dickie (Richard Bird, head groundsman) has still got to mow the grass, he’s got to keep on top of that so when we’re ready to play games and obviously the cleaners are going to be very busy for the time being.

"We’ve got to make sure that if and when we’re back, that all the offices are deep cleaned.

“On the football side, the academy is completely out of action at the moment, although many of the staff and coaches are offering to multitask and work on some other areas of the business.

"The first team in terms of staff, they’re currently at home operational.

"There’s a small group, a small number of people who will be available to come into the Brache to do a little bit of training, fitness training I should call it, with some players.

"I think for example, we will have players coming into the Brache for some fitness training and solo ball work.

"We don’t want them sitting at home or even training at home without some ball work.

"Clearly they’re going to observe the two metre distance from each other, we’re going to ask them not to car-share, that kind of thing in order to get into the premises.

"We expect they’ll be in small groups of four to six, doing some fitness activities, some gym activities outside, just to keep them ticking over really.”