The Football League will bring in new rules that will stop clubs finding wealthy benefactors to give them a shortcut to promotion.
In the past few years clubs such as Portsmouth, Leicester City and Notts County have managed to find billionaire owners to bankroll their ambitions to hit the jackpot of the Premier League. But Portsmouth, who were FA Cup winners in 2008 and runners up in 2010 will be playing League One football next year after running into financial problems whilst Leicester, despite hiring former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson and spending £10m on new players last summer will not even make the Championship play-offs this campaign.
In order to ensure financial fairplay across all three divisions the Football League are introducing Financial Fair Play rules, which state that, from 2014-2015 onwards any club that receives £6m or more from wealthy benefactors will face heavy fines. Owners can invest £6m next season, £5m the season after and then just £3m in 2014-15.
Reds Director Don Rowing who along with owner Patrick Cryne have run the club on a reduced budget this season is one of the first to speak out in support of the rules. He told the BBC:
"This will bring people into the game for the right reasons,"
"It will be a sufficient deterrent for the majority of clubs,"
"But there will always be dissenters who want to use the rules to their own advantage.
"For me, all our decisions should be based on financial common sense and if we don't do we will seriously compromise the future of all the clubs.
"It is an indictment of the industry that we need to go to the length of regulations to try and tell us to be sensible in the way we spend.
"But certainly we need to do that and we subscribe to that."
“There are people that want to put money into their clubs to chase the dream, but unfortunately they will have to face the nightmare at a later date,''
"There is so much hype now from people including supporters who want you to chase this dream of getting into a higher division and get into the Premiership.
"You look at the support base of some clubs and it is very, very difficult to realise their ambitions, but that is why there are people out and about who want to buy a club and push it forward."
If any club secures promotion to the Premier League by bending the rules they will be forced to pay a “fair-play tax” on their losses which ranges from 1% for the first £100,000 to 100% on anything over £10m.