Sunderland chairman Niall Quinn says that player wages would have been slashed if the club had been relegated.
Quinn has revealed that players' wages would have dropped by up to 50 per cent if the Black Cats had slipped out of the Barclays Premier League last season.
With Steve Bruce now at the managerial helm, Quinn is confident there will be no repeat of that survival scrap but he stressed it is a sensible precaution to guard against the possibility of the drop.
He said players have relegation clauses added into their contracts when they arrive at the Stadium of Light.
The Black Cats avoided the drop by two points on the last day of the season last term but Quinn says it would have been the players suffering financially if the team had gone down rather than the club's staff.
survival plan
Newcastle United and Middlesbrough have had to let go of a large number of workers to cut costs as they get used to life in the Championship but Quinn stressed that would not have been the case at Sunderland.
He said: "We had it planned for quite a while that relegation would be put more on the players than the staff.
"It wouldn't have been a knee-jerk reaction to do that. The players' salaries would have been trimmed, not the staff, and we had a survival plan in place.
"You don't feel so sorry for the player who has to go and drive his Ferrari out of the gates.
"We try very hard when it comes to relegation clauses. We've probably got to the stage where we're 90 per cent there and for new players now, we would insist on it."
