Notts County have resources and ambitions to reach Championship, says CEO
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Macaulay Langstaff (second from right) signed a new deal with Notts County in the summer
Notts County have the resources and ambition to reach the Championship and will not have to sell star players to try to make it happen, says chief executive Joe Palmer.
Notts are fifth after 24 games on their return to League Two after four years.
Record-breaking striker Macaulay Langstaff, whose 42 goals last term generated transfer interest, has scored 16 times so far this season.
"We absolutely don't need to sell," Palmer told BBC Radio Nottingham.
"When you are doing well and have players that are doing well, you are going to attract interest. But at the moment it's not important to us.
"With the budget we had at the start of the season, we understood there was an amount we would need to put in to the business - the owners understood that."
Increased attendances at Meadow Lane since the Magpies' return to the English Football League and a strong start on their arrival has meant the club's owners - Danish brothers Alexander and Christoffer Reedtz - have had to put less into Notts this season than anticipated.
"We have actually cut that in half effectively already because of the crowds we've had this season, so we are in a good place," Palmer said.
"We don't have any unexpected losses... and we have have more freedom to think this season."
The Reedtz brothers' takeover in the summer of 2019 saved the oldest professional football club in the world from the prospect of being wound up following relegation to non-league football for the first time.
Previous owner Alan Hardy had spoken of his financial capacity to take Notts back to England's second division when they were a fourth-tier club pushing for promotion in 2017.
Palmer has again spoken of the Championship being where the club aspires to be, but he insists the plan to get there differs significantly to those of previous regimes and approaches by similar-sized clubs.
'Sustainable Championship aims'
Wrexham, who won the National League title last season and were promoted alongside Notts, are a club with Premier League ambitions bankrolled by the Hollywood duo of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
Previously, Bournemouth have gone from winning promotion from League Two to the Premier League in six years - a feat helped by investment from their former Russian millionaire owner, Maxim Demin.
Notts' latest available accounts, for the 12 months up to June 2022 and covering the season before their promotion, showed the club owed more than £11.8m to "related parties".
"You see a lot of clubs, smaller clubs, that are achieving big things through a lot of owner funding," Palmer said.
"That is not the model we want to take, we want to do it in a sustainable way. Unfortunately that's not how it has been in the past and the club has run into trouble as a result of that.
"Something the fans want to hear the most is that the club is on a firm footing, is stable and is wanting to head toward sustainability and achieving growth.
"The modelling we have done at the moment would say that we can easily sustain ourselves in League One and probably in the lower Championship.
"For me it's about going as far as we can with being sustainable, and if you look at it in terms of fan base and size of our stadium then probably the top of League One or lower Championship is where that sits within the football eco system."