Blues boss Paul Jewell says football clubs must learn to cut their cloth accordingly with the Championship set to introduce UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations from next season. The clubs meet at Derby this month to finally ratify introducing measures it they initially agreed they would develop last summer.
Football League clubs owe a total of £700 million with Town’s last set of accounts, to June 2011, showing that their debts — almost entirely owed to Marcus Evans - have reached £66.17 million, and will have grown since then, with wages 98.8 per cent of turnover.
Under the Financial Fair Play plan, clubs will only be able to spend what they generate with those that fail to comply facing transfer bans and possible points deductions.
Jewell, whose deadline day move for Portsmouth pair Joel Ward and Stephen Henderson broke down because the players wanted contracts he believed were excessive, says clubs will have to pay players less in future: "The players we wanted to bring in we think are good players but at the end of the day we’ve got to start saying in football ‘Well, that’s the price’, because we’ve got the Financial Fair Play [regulations coming in] and we’ll have to work to a budget.
"Everywhere I look I see people losing jobs, taking pay cuts and not being paid as much as they were. It’s the same with football clubs, we’ve got to work to the Financial Fair Play [regulations], so we can’t pay people what we’ve been paying them in the past, it just can’t happen.
"This club’s paid the price of administration before and we don’t want to be doing what Portsmouth are doing. You’ve got to cut your cloth, although I know fans don’t want to hear it.
"If we can get people here on decent money, not silly money, and keep them hungry - young players - that’s the way forward.
"We’re not going to pay them peanuts, but we don’t want to be getting into the realms of silly money because silly money next year can lead to irregularities.”
But he says some clubs, including West Ham, are hoping to avoid the new Championship reality by throwing money at promotion before the measures are introduced: "I was speaking to Sam Allardyce the other night and he said they’re spending money now because he’s thinking that if they stay in this league next year, they’d have to lose nearly 75 per cent of their players. A few clubs are putting their eggs into one basket, gambling to go up.”