Portsmouth boss John Mousinho has again reiterated his belief that the Blues cannot compete with the financial strength of their rivals to stay in the Championship.

Mousinho has again cited Hull City, who signed eight players in a busy transfer window along with Luton Town, themselves signing the same amount, as both clubs look to escape danger.

While City were pushing for a place in the play-offs last season, the Hatters were swimming against the tide in the Premier League, eventually being relegated.

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Both the Tigers and Hatters have endured nightmare campaigns, while last season's League One winners have battled with a smaller budget, and sit a point and place above the Tigers in 20th ahead of Saturday's trip to Sheffield United.

"Luton have parachute payments and have spent money not many in the league can spend, let alone teams down the bottom. The likes of Hull have been busy, too, so it’s been a bit of a mixed bag," Mousinho told The News.

"What we can’t affect is what other sides do and we had our strategy going into the window, slightly varied from where we were in the past.

"We’re very clear that what we had to focus on was being stronger now and making sure we affect ourselves between now and the end of the season. We had to do that and the best way to do that was with loans, but we didn’t want to lose sight of the longer-term ones as well.

"If you look at Tom (Waddingham) and Hayden (Matthews), who have actually affected the first team anyway, we weren’t thinking they were ones who had to come in and be front-liners - whereas Isaac Hayden and Rob Atkinson were front-liners. They weren’t for future development, they were loans. We had to just get our own business right and make sure we were stronger.

"Whatever other sides decide to do, if they are spending huge sums of money on players, that’s not the way we want to operate. We want to do smart business and we are prepared to spend money - we showed that with the likes of Hayden, who we are really excited about.

"We have to keep going forward with that, do our best to stay in the league and keep moving forward. We have to be smart in everything we do.

"We have to recruit well and at the right time. We have to take the right players who are available to us - and I feel we’ve definitely done that. Then we have to balance that off with ones like Hayden Matthews and Tom Waddingham, who we didn’t earmark to impact the team straightaway.

"It’s about getting the business right, so we hopefully stay in the league and develop as a football club we have those front-line assets who are worth a significant amount of money.

"We just have to have a combination of the two and it is a difficult balance to strike in the Championship. We do want to to stay in the league so we’ve had to be short term, but we can’t completely lose sight of the long term or we’ll forever be bringing in five or six loans and fire-fighting. You have to get the balance between the two."