Matt Holland: Why should our game expect to be above the basic laws of economics?

So a football club needs to be bailed out by one of its former stars who is now a television presenter. It is good news for Leicester City, of course, but I cannot help but think that there is something terribly wrong with that idea.

Surely, and I am prepared to be corrected, it would have made better reading if instead of a former player coming to the rescue, it had been the current players.

Now I say this slightly tongue in cheek because the players at Leicester City have already agreed to a pay deferral, which we all know is a euphemism for a pay cut, and no one with a watertight contract would voluntarily give a lot of it up, but rather I want to demonstrate that the biggest cost in a club is usually the players. Pay them what the club can afford and there should be no need for the administrators to be called in.

I know that the issue can become clouded when clubs build new stadiums but the basic premise of my point is that you cannot pay what you cannot afford. The sooner football reintroduces itself to this most fundamental of business rules, the sooner the game will recover and then start to thrive again.

The figures do not bother me. If £5,000 a week is what the club can afford, then so be it. If David Beckham generates enough interest and sales across the globe to push his weekly wage to £100,000 and the club can afford to pay it, then he should be paid £100,000 per week.

Why do people think, or maybe that should be why did they think, that football could survive outside the boundaries of budgetary discipline?

I spoke to one of Leicester's players on Tuesday night. James Scowcroft, a former team-mate at Ipswich, had a couple of days off and came to watch our draw against Burnley.

All players in the game are concerned about the current threat which is facing clubs, so it did not take long for the conversation to turn to the financial crisis.

James was surprisingly upbeat, because the Professional Footballers' Association had conducted numerous meetings with the whole staff and reassured them that the situation was retrievable. Apparently during the past decade nearly 40 clubs have gone into administration and have come out the other side.

I have actually been at a club that has teetered on the brink of going under, so I could sympathise with his relief at the PFA's confidence. My last year at Bournemouth was a series of public meetings and fundraising as the club was bankrupt. One Friday afternoon the playing staff, the 20 of us that made up the team, substitutes and reserves, were sat down by the administrator and bluntly asked if we wanted to play the next day at Bristol City. If not, he would wind the club up and we could all leave on free transfers.

Of course, we all wanted to play, but that decision was also made for selfish reasons. In the Second Division there are only a few players who have the hope of better things, who interest other clubs.

Happily we won 1-0, and at the end of the season I was sold for £800,000 to Ipswich. That money, plus the sale of Steve Jones and a couple of other players, saved the club, although the creditors only received something like 10 pence in the pound.

The players are actually the last to feel the pain when a club struggles. The administrator's first move at Bournemouth was to strip the off-field staff to its bare essentials – about 10 people. People lose their jobs, creditors lose their money but the players are still paid. They are not the ones who need sympathy. Those that are made redundant can really suffer.

The fans, for whom the club is not about debit or credit ledgers but is a consuming passion, really suffer. These are the people deserving of sympathy. I still get correspondence from Bournemouth supporters thanking me for my efforts to help the club in that make-or-break season.

I was captain at the time and addressed meetings, one that involved over 3,000 people. I understood then that this was their club. The players are representatives and guardians but the fans own the club, in spirit if not in stock.

At least now I honestly believe that clubs are starting to shake out the financial excesses. These pay deferrals will become obsolete as the next round of contracts will have pay cuts on relegation written in. The escalation of players' wages has stopped and "budgets" are as much the buzzword around clubs now as Italian strikers were three years ago.

The game is sorting itself out, and let us hope that no clubs will go down during the process.

At Ipswich we are looking forward to meeting a new face next week. Not an administrator but a manager. Joe Royle, Tony Mowbray and one other are the current favourites, but I did laugh the other night when some friends listed the qualities and skills required. Diplomatically I did not contribute, just listened and chuckled when after a prolonged debate one said that the man we sought was George Burley. It's a mad world, football.

Matt Holland, the Republic of Ireland international and Ipswich Town captain, was talking to Iain Fletcher