Luton play Oldham Athletic today. For Luton it is a relegation fixture. The old Fourth Division beckons for the first time since 1968. The attendance is likely to be around the 5,000 mark. They have got Joe Kinnear as manager now, but his is a failing team at a failing club. Luton Town never made it to the Premiership.
They came close. Just two points separated them and Coventry City at the end of season 1991-92. But within months the clubs were in different leagues. For Coventry it was the Premiership, from which - as yet - they have never looked back. For Luton Town it was the Football League, from which they have rarely looked forward. Two clubs fairly equal in stature and history were about to be split by an awful lot of money.
They did not know it then. Like animals sensing the winds, they knew change was on its way. But they did not know it was a hurricane. How could they? How could anyone? When a former bank clerk who once stood in the goal for Blackpool reserves emerged from the Football Association's headquarters 10 years ago this week carrying a loose-leaf document, few suspected professional football in England was about to experience a revolution from such a benign source. But it did.
The 119 page document was called: Blueprint for the Future of Football and with it Graham Kelly, an influential, energetic bureaucrat who was far from just a messenger, initiated a mutation that enthused some, horrified many, but compelled all, and which this week accountants said was set to become the planet's first football league to have a billion pound annual turnover - the Premiership.
Or, to give it its full title, the Football Association Premiership, the FA, of which Kelly was head in 1991, being central to the decisive act of 22 clubs breaking away from the then 103-year-old Football League. The FA's participation also gave the breakaway league an invaluable amount of credibility. That mattered. Eight weeks after Kelly's final draft of `Blueprint' 16 of the 22 of First Division clubs lined up behind a statement of intent to leave the Football League. Only three clubs voted against it. Five days later, on the afternoon Liam Brady became manager of Celtic, the FA made their proposals official. Next came the resignations from the Football League, whose worried members fought stridently to prevent the breakaway's success by first trying to have its legality questioned, then by threatening not to co-operate with it. They lost.
They lost because the momentum was with Kelly and the FA and also because television was with Kelly and the FA. It is almost incomprehensible now that in the seasons immediately preceding the formation of the Premiership, Manchester United's overall budget was calculated on £30-40,000 per year from television. United's chairman, Martin Edwards, who had been looking for a way of recouping his £500,000 investment in the club, was one of the forces behind Kelly and 10 years ago was salivating at the thought of Kelly negotiating a new deal with ITV worth £20 million - that meant almost £1 million each for the breakaway clubs and nothing for the Football League clubs who, in any case were "bleeding the game to death" according to Edwards.
Manchester United floated on the stock exchange on the back of the deal and their victory in the European Cup Winners' Cup. They were valued at £47 million. It seemed like big money at the time. Edwards, who was willing to sell United for a fifth of that to Michael Knighton, sat back and smiled.
Then he got a big shock. Kelly was not doing the deal with ITV. Behind the scenes a satellite television company called BskyB, British Satellite Broadcasting, had offered the Premiership a rather more attractive proposal: £304 million over five years. Now this was big money.
Culturally, however, there was huge opposition. "Association Football was once the people's game," said the editorial in Rothmans Football Yearbook, the sport's bible. "Now it belongs to the Times and the sky's the limit." That Thatcherite Rupert Murdoch-owned the Times and Sky did not go unnoticed. Margaret Thatcher had only shown disdain for the national game.
Yet even Rothmans then was not wholly against the development. Sky had been cute enough to appease many by bringing in the BBC for selected highlight programmes. Match of the Day came back.
Rothmans argued the Premiership "must be encouraged whatever the misgivings attendant upon it," though it also warned: "For the armchair fan it may well become an expensive hobby."
Sky Digital's satisfaction on Wednesday at revealing that their 4.7 million subscribers have an average spend of £268 per year shows that Rothmans was right. Soon Match of the Day will be a memory. The satellite broadcasters had a longer-term plan.
Sky have used football as their `driver' in establishing first satellite dishes and then set-top boxes and cables as part of the mainstream. Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable that, as is occurring next Saturday, Man United will play Manchester City at 11 o'clock and Sunderland will play Newcastle at 5.15 to accommodate the television cameras. Now it is barely remarked upon.
Sky deserve some credit for televising the revolution with enthusiasm. But the great Premiership moments - Brian Kidd jumping onto Old Trafford after Steve Bruce's goal, Kevin Keegan's outburst at Alex Ferguson, Jurgen Klinsmann's ironic dive, to name three - came from football people as they had always done.
Moreover, because of the game, today people buy Hollywood films direct because they have the technology installed to transmit football. It would not have worked the other way round. Before they acquired the Premiership's rights BSkyB, operating from Battersea, were in danger of being as redundant as the power station.
They have paid a high price for their market prominence. The £304 million negotiated 10 years ago was followed by £670 million in 1996. Such figures interest the City and in came a number of high profile businessmen such as Alan Sugar at Tottenham and John Hall at Newcastle.
The sport became an industry, reaching a logical conclusion when Sky tried to buy Manchester United three years ago. By then Edwards was describing football as United's "core activity". Sky's interest was deemed monopolistic by the British government but not before other communications companies had jumped in: Granada at Liverpool, Carlton at Arsenal, NTL at Newcastle and Aston Villa.
And today, 10 years on from Kelly - who lost his job at the FA three years ago - the relationship between the game and television grows ever closer. The City may have cooled its interest, Jean Marc Bosman being responsible for that, but the punters keep coming back.
Manchester United make £1.67 million from them through ticket sales alone for each game at Old Trafford, and if the blueprint for the future of football was about anything it was about Old Trafford. They've made monopoly money from having a monopoly on the Premiership. Luton Town will make do with the board game.
