Rooney 'will have increased Argyle budget'

Wayne Rooney has returned to management after being sacked by Birmingham City in early January

Plymouth Argyle's owner says new head coach Wayne Rooney will have a bigger budget than his predecessors.

But Simon Hallett says Rooney, who took over as head coach last week, will still have one of the lowest budgets in the Championship.

Argyle twice broke their transfer record last summer when they spent £1m on Morgan Whittaker and Bali Mumba.

They also paid out fees for striker Mustapha Bundu and goalkeeper Conor Hazard.

"It'll be a bigger budget, but it'll still be towards the lower end of the Championship, but we have found some money to put into the playing squad," Hallett told BBC Sport.

Argyle are in their second season in the Championship and will benefit from a new television deal which sees a rise in the fees paid to clubs.

But the Argyle owner also warned fans that if the club got appropriate offers they would consider selling some of their players

Top scorer Whittaker was the subject of a multi-million pound bid from Italian giants Lazio in January while homegrown goalkeeper Michael Cooper has drawn plaudits for his performances over a number of seasons.

"We'll also be looking at our portfolio of players and maybe some of them will go, maybe some of them won't," Hallett said.

"But the whole point about the player acquisitions last year was to start on the path towards a kind of model of getting fairly regular - it'll never be completely regular - income from player trading."

Hallett says he is unaware of any formal bids for any of his club's players so far this summer.

But he says the club would consider any bid carefully before deciding whether to accept it or not.

"The model over the next few years is going to be that some of our top players will leave the club and the money that we get for that will be reinvested in the squad," he said.

"This is very much the model that lower revenue-based clubs need to do to achieve consistent success.

"People always think that if you sell a star player that you get nobody in return, of course, that's not true," Hallett added.

"We're building models that help us assess what fair value for players is, and when we get offers that are considerably in advance, and when we think we can use the proceeds to reinvest in the squad, then we'll do so."