Boss Mick McCarthy says he’s still waiting to see clubs punished for failing to adhere to Financial Fair Play (FFP). The Blues are amongst the Championship sides to have kept to the rules, which are aimed at limiting clubs’ losses.
Championship sides are required to submit their accounts for 2013/14 at the start of December with managing director Ian Milne having confirmed that Town’s losses will be within the required parameters.
Those who have transgressed the FFP rules will face transfer embargoes, unless they have been promoted to the Premier League, in which case they will receive heavy fines.
"I keep saying, I’m waiting to see somebody get punished,” McCarthy said. "I think FFP is bollocks, to be quite honest, because it doesn’t seem to me that people are adhering to it.
"Harry [Redknapp] and QPR, who are supposedly going to get fined, said ‘It’s not financial fair play because Man United have spent £70 zillion’.
"But it wasn’t for this season [they’re facing a fine], it was for last season when their wage bill was £75 million or whatever and ours was £5 million or £6 million.
"I’ve yet to see anybody get punished. Manchester City in the Champions League, they can only have a squad of 21, they must really struggle with that with the 21 players that they’ve got.
"I’ve not seen anybody yet in the Football League that it’s affected and I think it was just looking like it was going to affect people and they’ve upped [the permitted losses] from 2016.
"We do it the way we do it, maybe because we have to do it and at the moment it’s going OK. And there are others who have spent a whole shedload of money and it’s not. Spending money isn’t always the answer. Burnley didn’t, did they?”
He says being successful without spending significant amounts of money is particularly gratifying: "I’m like everybody else, it gives you satisfaction when you’re doing well and you’ve not spent anything.
"If you’re not doing well and haven’t spent anything you’re bleating like a lamb because you want some money because you could do better.
"When we’re doing well, we’re sort of having a smirk at everybody else who has spent loads of money."
He added: "But in reality we’re not because we’ve got good players in and are actually paying them decent wages.
"The players we’ve got in, we didn’t get rubbish on free transfers - Skusey, Berra, Gerken, Bart in the nets, Tyrone Mings only cost a pittance, Kevin Bru, lads who have walked in through the door, Hunty, Anderson, all of them that have come in.
"We’ve got good players, there must be something about the club and the people who are here that they want to come and play.”
He admits that he may not have recruited bargain signing Mings, who is now rated at around the £10 million mark, if he had had more money to spend.
"I might not have got him because if we’d got zillions to spend I’d have been looking somewhere else and not at free transfers or someone who cost £10,000 from Chippenham,” he continued.
"I wouldn’t have been doing that. Tell a lie, we would have still been looking at him but we might already have done something [with somebody else], so sometimes you benefit from it.”
He added: "It’s easier if you’ve got money. You know where you can go and get a decent Championship player for a million quid.
"If you’re looking at paying nothing for him, but you can give him wages, that becomes harder.
"There are a whole load that you can find. You find them on free transfers but what we’re trying to do is progress as well, not just stand still. And taking a chance on somebody like Tyrone helps us progress.”
He says it feels great when you unearth a gem such as the 21-year-old: "Everybody’s looking for them and when you find them it’s wonderful.
"If you think about it, Burnley last year took a lot of people on free transfers and only spent a little bit on Ashley Barnes and maybe a couple of others near the end. But they did it on a shoestring.”
Elsewhere, on-loan striker Jack Marriott missed Woking’s 3-1 victory at Halifax on Sunday, due to illness.