Was there ever any concrete figure for how much the budget was going to be cut by? If, as I have read the U-23 set up represented around 20% of the whole budget won’t the removal of this account for the majority of the budget reduction? As Les says, the average wage at this level isn’t huge, and there will be a lot of decent (for this level) players out there available on a free as everyone seems to be offloading players.
