Snowflake Royal In many ways, it's probably harder to build a competitive squad for the Championship next season than it is for L1.
Moore and Puscas have less incentive to leave and if we're stuck with them, plus Joao, Meite and Ejaria, that's roughly ~£6m of our £16m budget. Leaving us with £10m to split amongst about about 20 players, which is an average was of under £10k a week. Yes, Moore and Puscas staying is a bit of a worst case and we could probably sell at least one, if not more, of the other three to free up wages and bring in some money, but we have to replace them too. Which means we'd have maybe 2 to 5 decent Championship proven players.
On the other hand, if we go down, Moore and Puscas are likely to be much more cooperative in leaving. And we don't have to replace Joao / Meite / Ejaria, when selling them, with players anywhere near the same quality or cost. Yes, our wage budget probably goes down by ~£6m, but that £10m left suddenly stretches a lot further in getting L1 level talent.
Promotion would almost certainly be off the cards for a while, but it's not like our prospects have much more than Championship relegation fight in them for the short term if we do survive. Personally, I've had my fill of that.
Yeah that's true, there would be pro's and cons to both really. We can only hope that Pisa do gain promotion so that gets rid of Puscas and maybe Stoke will take Liam Moore off our hands.
The positive about going to League One would be of financial benefit but it would probably help our academy players as well. Players like Dorsett, Abbey and Azeez could play a bigger part in our squad on smaller wages and it would give us a good chance to develop some of our better players. We've seen that with many players we have released over the years, many are capable of flourishing in League One. Stacey, Dickie, Fosu and now even Sam Smith have all done well at that level.