The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) have slammed Football League proposals to force players to accept wage cuts if their clubs are relegated.
The PFA insist it is unfair and impractical for players to be singled out as the main scapegoats for their clubs' problems and that the League are wrong to highlight just one small issue within a much wider financial crisis.
The League want the PFA to agree to the inclusion of a clause in all contracts signed after this summer which would mean an automatic 50% wage cut for relegated Premiership players.
The PFA's deputy chief executive Mick McGuire said: "We are dead against it because it is not hitting the crux of the problem.
"Our experience from looking at over 30 clubs is that the level of salary is only one of a number of problems clubs have.
"It is an accumulation of mismanagement that has left them in those positions and it is not right that players have to bear that burden."
Whilst the League accept that players' wages are not the sole cause of the game's financial problems they insist a divisional pay structure is the way forward.
League spokesman John Nagle said: "The differential in wage levels between divisions has now become a genuine threat to the sustainability of clubs.
"There is widespread recognition that something needs to be done to give the market a fairer balance. We believe that divisional pay could be the answer."
But while the PFA agree that a degree of extra incentivisation within players' contracts might be the answer the union criticised the League's proposal of standard cuts across the board.
"Incentivised contracts have got to be something for the individual to negotiate," added McGuire.
"It has got to be down to individual choice and that is why the PFA are against salary capping and the unilateral way of doing it.
"There have got to be proper negotiations with a more imaginative approach to incentivised contracts. But the problems for clubs going down go far beyond the issue of players' salaries."
PA