MARK Hughes is throwing millions at a bid to break into the elite of English football.

With a blank chequebook, the Manchester City manager is playing his own version of ‘fantasy football’ at Eastlands.

His spending spree has even managed to get under the skin of his rival up the road.

But Brendan Flood has no intention of even trying to keep up with the Joneses.

With a windfall that he believes could sustain Burnley for at least the next 10 years, the club’s operational director is determined to buck the top flight’s modern monetary trends.

A wage cap of £15,000 a week is already in place, and Flood only envisages that rising by another £10,000 even if the Clarets were to retain their Premier League status.

“I think £20million is probably the maximum we’ll ever go to. If we’re in over the next two or three years I think that’s where we would stop,” said the Rossendale-born businessman.

“You have to have a bit of wage pressure to have a competitive side. You’ve got to have enough high quality players to get there. But we do want to keep a hold on wages, within reason, and just keep the message in the club and not necessarily do what every other Premier League club does, and sometimes does it badly.

“When you stand back and look at it there are lot of squad players in the top six clubs who aren’t getting a game and you think ‘if we had him, he’d be good for us’, and those sort of lads probably aren’t getting paid £20,000 a week; they’re probably getting between £5,000 and £10,000 a week.

“We’re talking per week, that’s half a million pound a year, so in everyday terms it’s a huge amount of money, but the levels we want to pay will be around there.”

As wage bills rise with promotion, albeit not excessively, so has Burnley’s stock. Having been scuppered by key January sales in previous seasons, Flood believes keeping their squad together last term was key to their success.

“There were lots of reasons for going up, but I think that’s the big one,” he said. “They’re all tight-knit and all wanted to do it for each other.”

But Flood accepts that outside interest in their crop of talented young players may be harder to fend off now they’ve reached the top flight.

“Automatically all the players are worth more because we’ve gone up, so we’ve got to say we might still sell players, but there won’t be a need to sell players now,” he continued.

“It will be a pure business decision if we did.”