Commitment to invest: Portsmouth chief’s playing budget message as transfer plans continue
Investment on the pitch moving forward has been a big topic of late, with chief executive Andy Cullen now addressing the issue.
Andy Cullen is adamant there’s desire from Pompey’s owners to push on-pitch investment.
The Blues chief executive is confident there’s the ‘commitment’ from the Eisners to take the club forward, as the club’s relatively low Championship spending power remains in the spotlight.
Cullen: ‘Collective commitment’ to allow Pompey to progress
But Cullen stressed the importance of finding other ways beyond owner investment to improve Pompey’s playing budget and transfer kitty.
With Pompey’s place in last season’s second-tier spending hierarchy believed to be in the bottom, John Mousinho once again overachieved by keeping the club in the division.
That led to the issue of how the Blues move forward in terms of playing budget, spending on transfer fees and the infrastructure around the first team.
Cullen is conscious of new Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) rules coming into play next term which limit clubs to spending 85 per cent of their revenue on first-team squad costs, but sees ownership keen to afford resources to progress the senior set-up.
Cullen said: ‘It (the playing budget) is all part of the strategy - what does that mean and where can we go next?
‘We’ve invested relatively well, which is why we’re in the position of outperforming where we are.
‘It’s a question of how we continue to do that, to do that we need to continue to invest.
‘We don’t always want to be totally reliant on owner funding, because the Independent Football Regulator will look very closely at that and SCR rules are now going to put some sort of brake on the clubs spending well beyond their revenue.
‘People will speculate on budgets, but we will never comment on budgets because it puts us at a real competitive disadvantage when you do so.
‘Every time I get a question about budgets I’m very cautious.
‘What we need to do is look at the full way we can continue to invest in the squad and areas around it to enable us to progress - there’s a collective commitment to do that.’
One clear revenue stream Pompey are keen to continue to utilise is the playing trading model, which saw a significant January success turning a £400,000 investment in Callum Lang into Preston North End paying a club-record fee for the attacker.
That return would likely be superseded by an exit for Terry Devlin this summer, with Pompey turning down a reported £2m bid from Wrexham for the man they bought for £70,000 from Glentoran in 2023.
Meanwhile, Adrian Segecic has been developed into a very bankable asset after around £200,000 was paid in training compensation to Sydney FC last summer.
Cullen added: ‘The trading model is set up in a way that we can continue to reinvest.
‘Callum went right at the end of the window and there was a temptation to just go out and spend the money.
‘But the guidance I had from the people around me, and the recommendation we collectively made to the board, was you shouldn’t be spending that money on someone we’re not 100 per cent ready to do so.
‘So we left it where it was because we felt the business we did across the rest of January was good enough to enable us to sustain a place in the Championship. That was the outcome, but that’s the idea of what we’re trying to do.’