IN the fourth of our five-part feature with former Latics head coach Keith Curle, he tells SUZANNE GELDARD about the chaotic working conditions he endured at Boundary Park

TO say Keith Curle was working on a shoestring budget at Oldham Athletic would be an understatement.

“A £1million wage bill, the smallest wage bill in the division, which I didn’t have a problem with,” he said.

But to discover that there was no leeway and there was a vice-like grip on the purse strings made life difficult when it came to building the squad he had initially envisaged.

Latics were limited to free transfers and loan signings, in addition to any new arrivals being salary capped and only able to sign one-year deals, all within a maximum 23-man squad.

Curle insists the restrictions would not have affected his decision to stay at Boundary Park for the 2021/22 season.

But had he been forewarned it would have influenced the players he was in the market for, and the offers he was able to make.

“If I’d known... there are ways round it. You can incentivise players in different ways, it’s not all about finances,” he said.

“Definitely what I would have offered would have changed because I wouldn’t offer something I didn’t have.

“I think they just saw they’d been given a lifeline with a lump of money but not understanding the implications it was going to have to the footballing department.

“There was a ceiling figure and we weren’t massively over it. It’s not as if you’re talking about a lot of money. We weren’t thousands above or multiple hundreds above. Sometimes it was £100 a week, sometimes it was £200 a week.

“On one offer that we made it was more than that.

“Some of the players had other offers on more money.

“If we’d have been in a healthier position, I spoke to Cole Stockton, I spoke to the lad Oates (Rhys Oates, who joined Mansfield after leaving Hartlepool last summer).

“I spoke to so many players in the summer that unfortunately had heard too many rumours that even though they could buy into me they couldn’t buy into what they had heard. They weren’t prepared to take the risk, which I understand. We were close to signing some good players, then at the last minute not being able to give them answers...”

Latics missed the boat.

There was no sign of the transfer situation improving by the January window either.

“I was trying to get head or tail of whether there were going to be any changes regarding the embargo when we come to January, and the answer was ‘no’," Curle continued.

“And then you’re thinking ‘right, you need to create revenue’, and then you hear that the club have turned down £250,000 for Harry Vaughan.

“We would have dropped the kid off ourselves. That’s in no way, shape or form any slant on little Harry Vaughan, but it’s a realisation and understanding of where the club was and what was needed. The club needed money to function and operate as a football club. Even just showing willing and showing that you want to pay the loan off, they (EFL) might have cut you some slack.

“There were other bills that were going to be coming in.

“There were little warning signs. The club had a company that provided the food on a daily basis. That money got taken out of the players wages.

“They had £30 taken out of their wages a month for food every day after training, and at the end of the month that money goes to that company. But that wasn’t getting paid.

“I had the strength and conditioning coach asking me to speak to the football club.

“It was food that the players had paid for, that gets deducted out of their wages, the next thing is I’m getting copies of bills and receipts being sent to me because the bill hasn’t been paid. So I stopped the food from the football club because if the club wasn’t going to pay that bill and the company in good faith were still delivering the food... the players had paid for it and the bill wasn’t being paid.

“You speak to the football club and are told ‘it’s going to get paid’, and it goes on for another week and another week.

"I told the players there was no more food and that they needed to start looking after themselves.

“I think I turned it around into a positive by saying with training at different times you don’t want to waste any opportunity, whether that’s training or food, don’t waste any opportunity. But the reality of it was bills weren’t getting paid.”

There had been a problem with late wages in the past, but Curle says that was not an issue he encountered.

“I never had a problem with any of my wages. I think there was one or two occasions when players didn’t get their money until the day after (payday), which can happen in any organisation. But apart from that everything else was paid,” he said.

“We went for the cheaper options as in accommodation. Wherever they had a choice they tried to get value, which I’ve not got a problem with, it’s the right way to run a business.

“It’s more than being a football manager, but it makes it easier the more you know. The more you know you know where the starting point is, what the plan is. It wasn’t a case of people keeping things from you, I would regularly speak to Karl (Evans), I regularly spoke to Michael Beech, and they couldn’t give me answers.

“How can you work like that? When the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing, how are you ever going to move forward?”

The Oldham Times has approached the club for a comment about the food bill.

TOMORROW: Meeting Abdallah, and why all the good people go