Burnley boss Sean Dyche working on “plan of attack” with new chairman Alan Pace for next season

The Clarets are seven points above Fulham, in 18th, with a game in hand on the Cottagers, and nine fixtures remaining.

They go to Southampton on Sunday looking to make another step in the right direction, but, while focused on one game at a time, Dyche is already formulating plans to build, under new chairman Alan Pace.

Should Burnley again retain their top flight status, they will have done so with a weaker squad than last season, both in terms of numbers and quality, having spent less than £1m in both transfer windows.

With the club under new ownership, Pace has outlined the intent to back Dyche, saying in January - albeit when the club failed to strengthen: “I don’t expect Sean to be frustrated. I can answer that directly.

"I hope he will be pleased with the way we can support him and interact with him, and that will be our efforts on a constant basis.

“We’ll support him in what he’s looking at and if he wants to go forward, we will be there to support him.”

Asked if Pace has some strong ideas on the way forward, Dyche said: "Some, but not on the football side, he said 'the football side is your world', the idea of the planning and business side of the club, the changes they want to try and make, that's their side, but they're not going to start telling me what I should or shouldn't be doing on the football side.

"That's clear, he's made that clear, he likes, like any chairman, to know what's going on, rightly so, but he's not going to start telling me what I should or shouldn't be doing, I'm pretty clear on that.

"It's an over-view about the whole club, how we work currently, things that we could add in, layering up, rather than taking away, different ways of working and ideas about how we can keep moving that forwards.”

So is Dyche encouraged by the new owners’ plans?: “It's not about being encouraged or discouraged, it's about realities.

”I've always worked on realities, and I've assured them that's how I intend to work.

"Rather than generalisations, we want a really good plan of attack of where we are, as a club, and what their thoughts are, and then where I think it is, and we join that together and see where we can take it.

"It's been an open discussion, a few discussions, about where we think it all is.”

There have to be different thoughts on different scenarios, until Burnley are mathematically assured of survival, and Dyche added: "There's always a bit of that, but it's always been there, we have to see the season through properly, as we always do.

"That's not new, scenario planning and the situation of what we can do, against what we maybe can't do, and all those things.

"It's only a change of person, the actual thought is the same, slightly different in the viewpoint of the bigger picture of the club, but still the immediacy is looking at possible transfer situations and what we could do, who we can align, looking at the financial side - these are standard things, it's nothing too private, at this moment anyway, just finding out what the thoughts are and sharing thoughts among us.”