BURNLEY have to keep on building from the base they set last season before they become an established Premier League team, according to former defender Michael Duff.

Now in charge of the Clarets’ Under-18s, Duff said the question of where the club could progress to next after top flight survival for the first time in 42 years last term was a ‘dangerous’ one.

The 39-year-old, who played more than 380 games for the club, said they must continue to build one brick at a time but admitted the progress since his arrival at Turf Moor 13 years ago had been remarkable.

“That’s the thing that people start assuming now, they think ‘we’re a Premier League club now so we’ll spend £30million on him and pay him £100k a week’,” Duff said when asked where the Clarets could go next.

“We’ve had one year. It’s important we keep building.

“We’ve got the facilities now so I imagine there will be more money going into the playing squad to make it even more competitive.

“Other than the top seven everyone else is in the league is looking at getting safe. The problem is we don’t have a foreign investor who’s going to put £3billion in the club.”

Duff added: “That can be dangerous now, people start assuming we’re a Premier League club, and ‘we should be doing this and we should be doing that, and why don’t we start knocking it around and trying to out football everyone’. People have got to remember what has got us where we are and don’t get too far ahead too quickly.”

The Clarets beat the odds to secure Premier League survival last season, finishing 16th on 40 points, six points clear of the bottom three.

They were never closer than five points to the relegation zone after Christmas but Duff said safety had to be the target again next season as Burnley seek to become a regular fixture in the Premier League as he warned against second season syndrome.

“How many teams have you seen go down in the second year?,” he said. “Because people come off it and sometimes players lose their heads.

“That’s why the Man Utd team were the best in the world. Ryan Giggs won 12 or 13 titles, that’s some mentality. He wasn’t still playing for money. He had the constant focus. It’s re-aligning that every year, and getting better a little bit.

“In the 13 years I’ve been at the club we’ve gone from the training facilities we had, getting changed at the ground and having seven players.

“Now we’ve got five internationals who can’t get in the team, and we’ve got this training building, so it’s come a long, long way.”