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Oldham Managing Director Simon Corney believes that the Football League need to introduce a salary cap across the board to prevent clubs from overspending.
Only in League Two is a cap mandatory, with Oldham's owners currently ploughing £50,000 a month into the club. But with the owners' own businesses struggling, costs must be cut for next season with Corney telling the Oldham Chronicle:
"Having a salary cap is something which we have favoured for some time as we believe it is the only way football clubs can survive. From our conversations with officials from other clubs, many are struggling. Unless something is done soon, I can see one or two folding in the next year. The salary cap would be based on gate receipts so the bigger clubs would have more to spend. There is too much pressure on chairmen to do silly things, and this would remove that danger and, hopefully, help all clubs to survive.
"Lord Mawhinney has been very receptive and has a good understanding of the needs of clubs. I have every confidence that he will come up with the right solution. We [the owners of Oldham] have had to downsize and make redundancies. Whereas we employed 300 at our peak, we are now down to around 90. We are going to have to adopt a more pragmatic approach to the football club and there is no way we will be able to put in sums like £500,000, £600,000 or £800,000 each year as we have been doing. Our spending is at a manageable level, but now we have to get it down to a practical level and it is up to us to be smarter in the way in which we run things."
The introduction of a salary cap across the board is one of the topics likely to be up for discussion at this summer's Football League AGM.
