'There's no pressure or expectation on Wilder'
- Published
Sheffield United CEO, Stephen Bettis, spent an hour on BBC Radio Sheffield for the Blades Heaven podcast. He took questions from BBC reporters and club supporters in what proved to be an illuminating discussion.
Question: Is it worth taking the gamble of losing players for free when trying to stay up?
"Is there a guarantee that we stay up at that point? There is no guarantee is there? You look at Nottingham Forest, they have signed 42 players and spent £250m since they have been in the league and they're still looking downwards, not upwards."
Question: What are the plans for the summer and next season? Will we keep Chris Wilder if we go down and will we use the parachute payments to spend wisely if we get relegated?
"That's the plan, to use them wisely. Let's be completely honest, we have the potential to lose maybe one or two players because they won't want to play in the Championship. We have to be mindful of that but the players in my head that I'm thinking of are actually on long-term contracts so if they want to go, we want to get the right money for them.
"We'll use that money and the money we get from the parachute payments to actually strengthen the squad for next season. Chris [Wilder] is under contract and will be here and the whole point of recruiting Chris at the time, I think was that when we made the change from Hecky [Paul Heckingbottom], we knew that Chris understood the club, understood the DNA, understood the culture and understood the way to move it forward and if the worst happened and we did still go down, he's got a proven track record of getting us back out so there's no better man for the job.
"The reality of it is, there's no pressure or expectation on Chris for the rest of this season to do anything in terms of results for us so that's not going to affect whether he is here next season or not."