Rival Championship chief takes aim at Sheffield United over Anel Ahmedhodzic signing & embargo

A Blackburn Rovers director has taken aim at Sheffield United after they beat the Lancashire side to the signing of Anel Ahmedhodzic in the summer - only to later be hit by a transfer embargo.

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The Bosnian defender arrived in the summer from Malmo, the former club of Rovers boss Jon Dahl Tomasson. As a result Rovers were in the hunt for the former Nottingham Forest man, before the Blades won the race for a fee of around £3m.

Recent newspaper claims have suggested that United are now attempting to renegotiate the structure of their payments to Malmo after falling on hard times financially, a situation that led to an embargo being put in place last month over overdue transfer money owed.

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And Rovers’ director of football Gregg Broughton has admitted that losing out on the influentual defender still “eats away” at him, telling RoversTV: “January is a tough month to do permanent deals. A few names are out there publicly of players we tried to do on a permanent basis.

“What I won’t ever apologise for is not risking the financial future of the club. We can’t go toe-to-toe with the clubs that have the parachute money, as much our supporters would like us to.

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“If this was about Jon’s ego or my ego and we said this was all about getting into the play-offs and persuading the owners to gamble, we could do that, but I’d be doing a disservice to the fantastic history this club has got if I was to do that.

“It baulks with me, eats away at me, that in the summer window we missed out for a central defender from Jon’s old club. It is on public record that we went in for him and we lost out on him because the other club could pay more than we did.

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“It annoys me that other club is now under a transfer embargo. That’s what we’re up against right now. The January window is a tough window to do business in. That’s not passing responsibility ... we should have done better than we did.”