David Holdsworth has insisted Carlisle United’s contract policy is not the reason the team is struggling – and stressed the club have made extra funds available already this season.

The arrival of major backers Edinburgh Woollen Mill on the scene has coincided with Carlisle adopting a tighter spending approach in recent times, with what fans’ trust CUOSC have described as “financial sobriety”.

Some fans believe this, and the policy of only handing out one-year deals with “reviews”, has limited United’s effectiveness in the market and led to the team’s lowly position so far this season.

Asked about this, Holdsworth disagreed the position of 20th in League Two after 13 games was a consequence of the contract policy.

He said: “I think that’s people trying to find an argument when things aren’t going well.

“The policy we brought in was no different to last year. We’ve stabilised this club dramatically, having been very unwise in previous years and putting our club in a position of difficulty, monetary-wise.

“We are now in a far better place. We still always want to improve that, as I do myself, but we don’t spend what we haven’t got. So, there’s your facts.

“Supporters will always want more, as does the manager. But let’s put it this way, Steven [Pressley] had a firm budget, he knew what it was when he came in and he knew what it was in the summer, but we’ve extended that and we’ve given him more.

“We brought in two players over that budget [Elias Sorensen and Gethin Jones], so nobody can say we haven’t supported him, and Steven knows that.

“We have a good sized squad, we’ve got good youth players with a far better connection with the youth team than we had before. Things are stable in that area. It’s on the pitch where we need to improve. Length of contract doesn’t come into it.”

Asked if further struggles would make him reflect and conclude things could have been approached differently, Holdsworth said: “I do that every day. I think, could we look back and say, ‘Well, could we have given him more money?’ No.

“Any manager who came through the door, be that Steven or any number of others who wanted to take the club forward, they’d have had the same format.

“I had interviews last year with people who were here just to be managing a football team. I’m talking about managing a team, not a club.

“People like Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, they were at their clubs for so long that they managed the club. If you look at [Mauricio] Pochettino, he doesn’t manage Tottenham, he’s a head coach who looks after the team. Gareth Southgate doesn’t run the FA, he manages the team.

“Steven Pressley manages the team. He changed certain things when he came in, as every manager does, inside the dressing room and he wanted to do this and that, and he’s done it. He has a very clear working format.

“If you look back to ask if I’d have taken certain responsibilities off Steven, then no, because he has to be able to manage the team. That means he has to be responsible for the dressing room, along with his staff, so there’s no grey area here, absolutely none at all.

“Things that take up a lot of time for some managers are done for him, and it’s me who takes on those responsibilities and we’re in a good place.”

Holdsworth said it would not have been the “responsible” thing for him to impose players on Pressley at a time the manager was waiting for certain targets during the summer.

“He wanted to wait, so we allowed him to wait, and he did that with Sorensen, who we eventually got,” he said. “We actually waited after our budget was finished on that one. We were obviously grateful to Newcastle and to Shola Ameobi for helping us with that as well.

“We had to wait for [Byron] Webster, and for [Nathaniel] Knight-Percival, and we brought in [Olufela] Olomola late on when there was a striker that became available. We also got [Ryan] Loft, and that was Steven’s principle – he wanted to wait for these players.

“Recruitment was done early with certain players but, as I’ve said before, it was a very long summer. Would it have been my way? Perhaps I’d have had a different opinion, but I’m not the manager and I don’t manage the team.

“All I make sure is that they come in at the right price, for the right amount of money, and Steven was extremely happy to wait, that was his method and thinking, and that’s why we supported that.”