BACK when Wanderers returned to the big time with a famous play-off victory over Preston North End, Phil Gartside reckoned the club would do well to spend half the next decade rubbing shoulders with the elite.

Now, as he looks to preside over a tenth successive term in the Premier League, the chairman has reflected on the highs and lows that went with turning a supposedly unfashionable club back into an established force in the top flight.

“When I took over as chairman, we looked at what a success would be at Bolton,” said the Leigh-born businessman and lifelong Wanderers fan.

“We’d had a flirtation with the Premier League for one or two seasons, and we’d liked what we had got out of it. It was the place to play football, there’s no question – you look at the quality of the football, as well as the atmosphere that comes into the ground when you’re playing in the Premier League.

“We said that if we could sort of stay in the Premier League for 50 per cent of our time, then it would be an achievement. So I think that to kick-on and do 10 consecutive years has been a great success.

“Once you get a taste for it, your expectations rise and I think our job has been to manage expectations. I think people have expected us to push on and push on.

“We’ve got to try and manage that. We’re all fans, and we all get those cravings for success. Once you’ve had a taste for it, you really want to push on and go for more.”

Therein lies one of the major problems Gartside has faced in recent years.

Having watched the likes of Jay Jay Okocha, Youri Djorkaeff and Nicolas Anelka push the club on to unimaginable heights, and four top 10 finishes under Sam Allardyce, fans had a hard time watching the club begin to struggle, as time caught up with the team and the Premier League vista changed considerably under fresh investment.

Big Sam’s departure – and the massive fall-out that followed – then proved to be perhaps the biggest threat to Wanderers’ top-flight survival to materialise over the last decade.

But while the chairman acknowledged the debt owed to Allardyce and the foreign legion of stars he created, he also gave credit to Gary Megson, who came in after Sammy Lee’s short tenure to perform what would be a vital, if unheralded, rebuilding job.

“We had seven years of Sam (Allardyce) and he certainly contributed a massive amount to the success of Bolton Wanderers, no question,” he said.

“I think what was missed was that there was a team of people behind him, both on the field and off the field, commercially and in administration, that contributed. So after his departure, we went through a transition.

“Gary (Megson) had made an impact – he had stabilised the club.

“Clubs have gone through that transition and not come out of the other side very well. I think, having been through that experience, again we are a lot stronger, and the Reebok is a lot stronger in terms of experience – we know what to look for and we know how to tackle these problems.

“Now, Owen (Coyle) coming in is going to bring a totally different style to it.”

The Premier League era has seen Wanderers’ record transfer fee spiral from the £3.5million paid for Dean Holdsworth in 1997 to the £8.2m shelled out for Swedish striker Johan Elmander from Toulouse.

Elsewhere, both wages and transfer fees have increased at an even dizzier rate, leaving most clubs struggling to keep up the chase.

Eddie Davies’s continued investment has kept the Whites afloat over the last nine seasons, although Gartside warned that the task of competing for top class players is becoming a tougher task with each passing campaign bringing with it another bottomless pit of foreign investment.

“Ten years ago, if we’d have made a million pounds from the corporate side of the business then that would have been enough to fund another player,” he said. “Today that’s not enough.

“The average price of the player now has gone from maybe £1m to £10m and obviously we can’t compete at that level – not many clubs can, by the way. That’s not a slant on Bolton Wanderers, that’s clubs in and around our level who are all having the same problems.

“That creates more competition because we’re all going for the same players. If you want quality, there’s only a certain pool of quality that you can go for and we’re in that mix. We’re also competing with the Stokes and the Blackburns and the Wigans to try and get into that market.

“To play catch-up with Manchester City, we’re talking about £400m, not £10m, not £20m, not spending it on another striker.”

A concerted push is being made, however, to make the club’s Academy start paying bigger dividends.

Manager Coyle has publicly put pressure on the youth set-up to start delivering players capable of figuring in his first team.

Costing around £2m to run each season, Gartside reckons that if improvements can be made to the end products coming down the conveyor belt, then the financial pressure placed on owner Davies can be reduced.

“Being realistic, the youth system has got to work because we can invest in the youth and we’ve got to see some return for it,” he said.

“We’re not going to be able to go and buy footballers at £10m and £15m every year because we don’t have the fan base or the resources to do that, and we’ve got to find other ways of doing this.

“That’s the way Owen wants to move forward, he wants a younger team, he wants a team of youngsters who are going to run for him, obviously youngsters with talent. Hopefully youngsters with talent, who have been brought on by Bolton Wanderers; that’s the way forward, there’s no question.”