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West Bromwich Albion will not be in a position to sign striker Dwight Gayle on a permanent basis, technical director Luke Dowling confirmed.

Gayle was a hugely popular figure with fans after finishing the season as the club’s 24-goal top scorer.

Many supporters have called on the Albion hierarchy to strike a deal for the 28-year-old, who returned to parent club Newcastle last week after Albion were knocked out of the play-offs by Aston Villa.

But Dowling said the Baggies were having to cut their cloth after missing out on promotion and that Gayle’s high wages would jeopardise the financial stability of the club moving forward.

“No-one would like to keep Dwight more than myself,” Dowling said.

“We can all recognise what he gives us on the pitch and the way he conducts himself off the pitch in the local area – he’s brought his family down from Newcastle for the year, he’s brought into everything we want to do.

“Financially, we were prepared to pay the money for Dwight’s contract for this season. It hasn’t worked out (because we didn’t win promotion).

“Dwight’s contract is a Premier League contract and we will pay Premier League contracts, but we’ll only do that once we’re back in the Premier League.

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“I know it won’t be the news Albion fans want to hear, but they need to trust us and know we’re doing everything right for this club.

“We don’t want to keep players on big contracts and have to lay the general staff off and make people redundant.

“We want to keep everyone here because we’ve got good people behind the scenes.”

Albion were understood to have had the second-highest wage bill in the Championship last season.

The club will be competitive on that front once more next season, but there will be one or two more sacrifices and an unavoidably high turnover in the playing staff, Dowling warned.

He said: “If you add the loan fees we paid for Dwight Gayle and Harvey Barnes, the fees we paid for Sam Johnstone and Kyle Bartley and the money we paid for loans in January, financially we gave it our best shot this season.

“Next season it will be slightly different. We’ll take the right risks in player recruitment that will benefit the club.

“If it means two, three, four, or five players move on, then they move on. We have to back ourselves to replace them.

“We had a group of players who we believe can play in the Premier League. When I joined in September, they as a group were willing to give it this one season.

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“A lot of them, with the age that they’re at, will be thinking if I don’t go to the Premier League now then I could spend the rest of my career in the Championship.

“We were a penalty away from getting to Wembley but we have fallen short.

“I’m not going to sit here and say we’ll be kicking off next season with the same squad, we won’t be.

“There will be changes, but changes made for the right reasons for this football club.”