SEAN Dyche admits it 'could be a few years' before Burnley's European scouting network is at the level required to start bringing in recruits from the continent.

And Dyche highlighted the fact that the club don't want to make mistakes in the transfer market as one of the primary reasons for continuing to look at domestic talent.

Burnley's three summer recruits all came from domestic rivals, with Joe Hart arriving from Manchester City, Ben Gibson from Middlesbrough and Matej Vydra from Derby County.

The £8million addition of Steven Defour from Anderlecht in August 2016 was the last time the Clarets signed a player from Europe, but Dyche said the difficulty in fully researching a player from overseas remained a major hurdle to get over.

"I can call youth coaches who have had players we’ve got here so there’s a lot of background to be done," Dyche said of understanding the background of players who have played in England.

"Others less so, I always give Steven Defour as an example, he had 46 caps for Belgium, in one of the golden eras for Belgian football, therefore he has to have a bit about him.

"He was captain at a young age, played against an arch-rival when they had posters saying we’re going to cut your head off. If you can handle that you're a tough character, so that’s a bit of common sense.

"But if you’re about layers and layers of scouting we’re not there, it could be a few years before we are."

That ability to do more background work on domestic players means the club feel they are taking less of a risk on signings as they might be from Europe.

"It takes investment as well, the club has to adjust to the levels of investment is correct," Dyche said.

"Whatever investment you put into scouting there’s no guarantees anything will come out of it. It’s not an easy thing to do. We all know clubs who have put a lot of money into that and haven’t got it right by a long, long way.

"The other big thing at Burnley Football Club is they don’t want to make mistakes. This club wants to hedge its bets on financial safety rather than £10m in France, £10m in Belgium and £10m in Holland and let’s hope they work.

"This club doesn’t want to do that because they haven’t got the finance, or the club don’t want to put the finance into it, whichever way you want to look at it."

Brexit could yet have an impact of clubs' ability to sign players from abroad, but Dyche insists he's not concerned about changes in regulations.

“I have no concern over it, I’ve no problem where players come from, but we haven’t got the depth of scouting that everyone else has," the Clarets chief said.

"If you’re Tottenham, they’ve been layering scouting across that for years, if you think we’re going to beat them to the best players in Europe, we’re not, so I apply common-sense to it.

“If we haven’t got that depth, and knowledge, but we have on a British player, that’s just business practice.

“If the laws change, we’ll just work with it."