A mid-table finish in League Two for Wycombe Wanderers this season would represent success for the club, according to manager Gareth Ainsworth.

When Andrew Howard became chairman 12 months ago he and the Blues boss agreed on a five-year plan to get the club back on a stable financial footing, with the ultimate aim of building a sustainable League One team.

The first year of the plan took everyone by surprise. Reaching the play-off final was a massive overachievement but the monetary windfall and prestige of an appearance at the national stadium haven’t acted as the catalyst for the pair to abandon their plan.

In his Wembley press conference after defeat to Southend, Ainsworth spoke of how the aims in year two of the plan would stay the same regardless of how close the club had come to reaching League One three years ahead of schedule.

Seven days before the start of the upcoming League Two season, and after a 1-1 draw against Aldershot, the 42-year-old reaffirmed the team’s targets for the new campaign.

“The players know that year two is a new one. Year one was survival and year two is mid-table,” he said.

“You look at mid-table last year and 61 points was 12th place, so I think getting there will be a successful season for Wycombe Wanderers and anything after that will be a bonus.

“People have got to realise that it’s still a battle. Although we did change the books round and things looked rosy after the play-off final, we still owe a lot of money and we’re still in debt as a club.

“We want to build a strong foundation to move forward on and it’s not going to happen in 12 months. The difference now is that we’ve got stuff in place to make sure that we can start building and thinking about the next level. Getting there will be a totally different matter.”

A club record points haul last season, a flirtation with automatic promotion and a trip to Wembley, naturally, will have raised expectations of what the club is capable of doing this term.

Managing those hopes and lofty ambitions will be half the battle, according to Ainsworth.

He said: “The characters we’ve recruited are very intelligent boys and they know that if you’ve got to a play-off final one year it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get automatically promoted the next year.

“I’m hoping that the fans also share that sentiment. I know this game is a tough game and there’s many teams that have had a great season one year and then teams have raised their game against them and there’s all these different factors that come into things.

“One step at a time and we’ll see where we go. Slowly, slowly – that’s how it’s always been at Wycombe Wanderers and I’ll be the first to tell you when that approach changes.”

Despite a bumper pay day via the play-offs and chairman Howard telling Trust members that the club will have made a profit when the club’s finances are revealed in November, Ainsworth is still working with financial restrictions that some of his divisional rivals are not akin to.

One deal that perhaps sums up the gap between the spending power of Wanderers and some of League Two’s richer clubs best is Luton’s capture of Craig Mackail-Smith – a player who has seven caps for Scotland and who’s been plying his trade two divisions higher for the past four years.

Operating on a tight budget has meant free agents have been the bulk of Ainsworth’s signings since he took charge in September 2012, but, as he enters his third full season as a manager, he remains optimistic that he can produce a team to compete with the best that League Two has to offer.

“There’s a player (Mackail-Smith) there that’s been on thousands and thousands of pounds a week and there’s no way in a million years that we could ever compete with that sort of money,” said the Blues boss.

“It does show the gulf in class and in finances in League Two. There are teams going for it this year – your Cambridges, your Lutons, your Portsmouths. The astronomical sums that are being talked about are getting players in, and we could only dream of that.

“When I do say we’re underdogs I think people have got to start looking up and saying ‘yeah, we are’. We’re still Wycombe Wanderers, we had a fantastic year last year and everyone will remember that day for a long time – the day that we got to Wembley and performed in front of all those fans.

“It’s a new season now and teams have found more money. We’re ok, we’re similar to where we were last season but we’ve got fight in our team, we’ve got fire in our bellies and I know we can compete against the top teams.”