David Prutton column: Days of splashing the cash in the Championship look over

People talk about the financial bubble bursting one day but the Premier League and other elite clubs are getting richer as the years go on.

It’s different in the Championship, as everyone knows, and little by little we seem to be seeing a creep away from an attempt by those in it to make the division the equivalent of Premier League elite.

You’ll still see transfer fees being spent and parachute payments make splashing the cash an option for some but I get the sense that the days of buying your way out of the league are starting to ebb away.

Aston Villa won the play-off final and on that basis you could say that high expenditure still works but Villa are posting very big financial losses and they catch up with you eventually if promotion refuses to come.

Other owners in the Championship will be far more taken with what went on at Norwich City and Sheffield United this season, and, to a certain extent, Leeds United as well.

The common theme with all three of those clubs is that none of what they did was down to incredible wealth or ridiculous spending power. On the contrary, Norwich City made a specific effort to cut down their expenditure and take a different, more prudent approach and Sheffield United’s budget is way down the scale in Championship terms.

They typify the way in which more and more teams are starting to think that good recruitment and costly recruitment are not necessarily the same thing.

Marcelo Bielsa is like that, too. He needs signing like anyone else and Leeds have to get a few more ticks in the transfer market this summer but in his head a football team is a collective animal; more about the machine than individual faces. It’s about finding the right person for the right position rather than making obvious signings and the same can be said for Norwich and Sheffield United. Who expected Teemu Pukki to be the Championship’s player of the year?

Who would have thought that so many members of Chris Wilder’s squad are headed for a year in the Premier League?

All of this re-emphasises the importance of a recruitment team who go beyond the obvious targets which literally anyone with a brain could pick out.

It’s telling that Stuart Webber, Norwich’s director of football, is starting to gain a big profile.

He’s been behind promotions at Norwich and Huddersfield Town, both in seasons when neither club was fancied to go up, and it’s impossible not to look at him and conclude that Championship clubs should be operating in that way.

The same goes for coaches. You can put the most expensive of squads together if you’ve got pockets deep enough but if you don’t have someone in charge who knows how to construct the best XI on any given day, it usually counts for nothing.

Again, and despite the fact that Leeds missed out on promotion, the quality of coaching from Wilder, Daniel Farke and Marcelo Bielsa was so obvious for so much of this season.

In a lot of ways, a set-up like theirs – modest budgets, modest recruitment, managers determined to make the best of what they’re given – creates the romantic stories which football needs.

If you spend £50m on a team and win promotion then really, the plot was spoiled at the start. It’s particularly gratifying when collective spirit and collective endeavour, the desire to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, brings about success.

Financially, the landscape is definitely changing and the points deduction Birmingham City got from the EFL in March felt like a watershed moment. If any of us doubted that FFP was real or here to stay, or that clubs would ever have to truly stick to it, then that punishment told us otherwise.

It’s a pretty clear message: break the boundaries and you’ll take a hit, in the worst way possible.

Fines are one thing, and I’ve had a few in my time, but points deductions are another. As I and Leeds know well, they smash a huge dent in your season and can turn a very promising year into a mid-table finish or a mid-table finish into a relegation battle.

Put simply, you can’t take the risk when that sort of sanction is on the table and punishment from the EFL tends to be quite arbitrary. Are you going to get hit with three points or 12 points?

What’s the damage going to be? It’s created a game of jeopardy for anyone who’s thinking of over-spending.

For that reason I think we’ll see a lot of measured work in the transfer market this summer.

I think the evidence of the season behind us will make a lot of clubs decide that a move away from big-money signings to the little gems no-one else has spotted might be the way to go. There’s never any substitute for quality but in this division and at this level, what matters more is how a team works as a unit and the presence of square pegs in square holes.

We all love a big transfer deal but it seems to me that the Championship is moving on.