CRAIG Brown is to bring a French touch to Deepdale.

He is to introduce French style coaching methods to the club as a way of nurturing young players into the squad without spending scarce resources .

Speaking to the club's website he said: "We'll try and run the club along the French lines and have a good quality squad of senior pros, around 20 in number.

"And then supplement that with promising youths and not sign a player just to add to the squad, who isn't going to be playing.

"The loss of the ITV Digital money means you have to prune your squad, keep it tight and make sure everyone is worthy of earning their salary.

"And that is our job, to make sure we don't have fringe players who aren't going to be competing for first team places.

"Whereas before you might have said there was a luxury of saying 'well we'll take a chance on this guy or that guy' we can't do that now.

"You have to be more specific and put your money where your mouth is.

"The French do it to perfection. In France you can only sign 20 players in each squad.

"Because in that scenario if I wanted to sign someone and had 20 players - over the age of 21 - then I would have to get rid of one.

"This means the least valuable player in the squad would be freed if you couldn't sell them."

When asked how it would work at North End he said: "I think we have to try and operate that way here at Preston, without it being mandatory.

"Our objective will be to only have 20 players in the squad who are over 21 and any supplementary players to last the season forces us to have a good youth policy.

"We're desperate to get the young players involved here at Preston and that's what we'll be working hard to do."