Tony Mowbray has stressed to supporters how Rovers are working to extend the contracts of the club’s star names – but the pay structure in place is making negotiations tough.

Adam Armstrong was sold to Southampton last week for £15m having headed into the last year of his deal, though Mowbray admits the club were prepared to break that structure for the 29-goal striker.

The manager felt with more years remaining on his deal, the club would have commanded at least £25m for Armstrong who scored on his Saints debut.

Ryan Nyambe, Darragh Lenihan, Joe Rothwell and Ben Brereton are just some of the players whose deals expire next summer, but contract extensions have proven difficult for Rovers in the last year.

Hayden Carter joined Bradley Dack and several Academy graduates in penning their long-term futures to the club, but deals for more senior players have reached something of an impasse.

With a pay strucutre in place that Mowbray says would be unwise to break, he admits it is leaving the club in a vulnerable position. 

“You have to have a structure for your football club because if you start to break pay structure you’re going in the wrong direction, unless you have the finance to do it,” Mowbray said.

“For Adam, we would have broken that structure because we knew the asset would keep growing, but in the end he didn’t want to.

“We have other players at this moment where negotiations are difficult for this football club, we understand the talent, we’d sign all of them but the numbers start to run away a little bit.

“As a club we have to decide whether to cash in because we don’t pay our players that kind of money, or we give them it and hope they keep progressing, stay motivated, but those are owner decisions not manager decisions in my opinion on where we take our football club and what the finance is.

“The players are growing up, Joe Rothwell is a classic case, he’s not a young kid who we signed from Oxford, he’s a big, big player in our team and eyes are on him and he and his agent will know that.

“I feel as though I have a good relationship with all of my players but agents are agents, they have a job to do and it’s business. That’s the difficulty.

“A message to our fans is that we want to keep all of our best players but it’s very difficult. They live in a world where the right move can change their lives, and their children’s and generations of their family.”

Of the current Rovers squad, Thomas Kaminski’s contract expires in 2022, but the club have an option in their favour.

Nyambe, Bradley Johnson, Jacob Davenport, Rothwell, Dan Butterworth, Harry Chapman, Brereton, Lenihan and Tyler Magloire all see their deals expire at the end of the season.