Luton boss doesn't see Town as the 'paupers' of the Premier League

Luton boss Rob Edwards insists his side should by no means be considered as ‘paupers’ when it comes to looking to strengthen their squad in the January transfer window.

The Hatters broke their transfer record on a number of occasions in the summer when making over 10 new additions, snapping up the likes of Mads Andersen, Tahith Chong and Ryan Giles, the latter reportedly costing in the region of £5m. With promotion to the Premier League bolstering Town’s kitty to around the tune of £100m, it led to a summer spending spree of nearly £20m, dwarfing anything the Hatters might have shelled out in the past.

Although upgrades required to make Kenilworth Road ready for the highest tier of English cost in the region of £13m and another large chunk saved to finance the building of a new stadium at Power Court, Edwards still has funds to spend if he so wishes this month. It won’t be on quite the same scale as the other others teams in the division of course, but asked whether he looked on with envy at the financial muscle the rest of the top flight clubs possess, he said: “Maybe one day we’ll be in that position, but we’ve got to look at where we’ve come from and what we can do now and we’re doing pretty well, we can compete.

"We’ve got to do it in our way, so I don’t see us as paupers, we just do it our way and if, and it’s a big if, if we can stay at this level, and keep competing for a longer period of time then we’ll be in a better position to keep growing and building. It’s just this is the nature of it. It’s our first year in the Premier League, we’re never going to go out and be able to match a lot of the other clubs, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go out and sign good players. We’ve got good players in the building as well, so I don't see it that way, I quite like the challenge of it.”

With Luton in with a real chance of Premier League survival at the midway point of the season, a win over Burnley this evening taking them out of the bottom three by leapfrogging Everton, other clubs in the same position could be tempted to go for broke and make a number of signings to boost their chances of staying up. Edwards doesn't believe that will happen from those holding the purse strings at Kenilworth Road though, adding: “I just think there’s just a plan here and we’ll stick to that. We’ll be backed if we think there’s someone who can really help us, but again I say we’ll be backed, there’s a level to that.

"But that’s fine, that’s just what we do. If you look at some of the performance levels of a lot of our lads this season, there’s probably quite a lot of value building in this group of players as well, so we’re doing all right from that side of things. We’ll just try and keep performing and we’ll just stick to our plan. If there’s someone available, I’m sure we’ll get backed, but it’ll be a certain level.”