Wycombe boss Gareth Ainsworth has promised Wanderers fans that the club will be in the market for new players before the transfer window closes a week today.

After seeing his team lose their first four league games, Ainsworth was given the go ahead by owner Rob Couhig to sign the reinforcements he hopes will transform their season.

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But fans expecting Wanderers to ‘splash the cash’ in a bid for Championship survival will be disappointed.

Wycombe are the poor relations of this division, so the loan market is the likeliest source of new recruits.

Most of their rivals have already spent eye watering sums of money to buy players this season.

Norwich signed Jordan Hugill from West Ham for £5m, Cardiff spent £2m on Wigan striker Kieffer Moore and Jonathan Leko moved to Birmingham from West Brom for £1m.

Even Coventry, who were promoted from League One with Wycombe last season, paid a fee of £1.5m for Brazilian midfielder Gustavo Hamer.

You have to go back 19 years for the last time Wanderers spent a substantial sum on a player.

In 2001 they bought Darren Currie from Barnet for £200,000, equalling what they had paid the same club for Sean Devine two years earlier.

Those amounts would not even cover the agents’ fees for the record signings made by every Championship club apart from Rotherham, and even their biggest outlay on a player is twice what Wycombe have ever paid.

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Watford top the list of Championship big spenders, paying £30m for Senegal international Ismaila Sarr.

Bournemouth (£25m) Stoke (£18m), Huddersfield (£17m), Middlesbrough (£15m) and Cardiff (£15m) have all spent fortunes on their record signings.

Nottingham Forest (£13m), Queens Park Rangers (£12m) and bottom-of-the-table Sheffield Wednesday (£10m) have also paid huge transfer fees to sign star players.

Even Championship ‘paupers’ like Barnsley and Millwall have handed over cheques for more than £1m in the transfer market.

The lure of reaching the Premier League, or the target of simply remaining in the Championship, tempts clubs to make these huge investments, and most of them can afford it.

A recent survey revealed that ten Championship clubs have billionaire owners and only four (including Wycombe) are run by men with a personal wealth of less than £100m.

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It is a hugely different financial world that Wycombe find themselves in after winning promotion, and a far cry from their halcyon days as an amateur club.

Those fans who think Wanderers should be spending more on new recruits need to realise that their Championship rivals have much greater resources and will always be able to sign the top-quality players.