A leading sports accountant has warned Scottish football fans that even Championship signings will be a thing of the past for SPFL clubs in the wake of this week's £5.136bn Sky and BT Sport deal with the English Premiership.

Charles Barnett, an accountant with BDO Sports Group, believes that the first sign that the Premiership is further awash with money will be the massively inflated salaries that will quickly come on the heels of this week's announcement.

Fourteen of the 30 biggest earning clubs in the world were English, according to the Deloitte Money League published last month; all 20 English Premier League clubs appear in the top 40.

And Barnett predicts that the bulk of that cash will be spent by clubs on offering bigger salaries to attract more players - effectively ruling Scottish clubs out of doing business with either the top or second top tier south of the border.

"My view is that the extra money that is going to be pumped into the Premiership will almost certainly be eaten up in player salaries," he said.

"I don't necessarily think that clubs will make more profits or head off on an extravagant spending spree. The money will be retained in football but if you look at the history when Sky has previously upped the money, what you get is a 'prune juice' effect.

"What I mean by that is that what goes in at one end comes out the other - in this instance in player wages.

"The players in the Premiership are paid substantially more and there is a trickle down effect of that into the Championship. So what you effectively see is that Scottish clubs are priced not only out of Premiership players but also the tier beneath that."

The deal will mean that each televised English Premiership game will Sky £10m; two games cost them more than what they pay the Scottish league in an entire year.

The news caused anger in SPFL boardrooms up and down the country this year given how little of the money they see.

Yet, Barnett does not believe that the writing is on the wall for the Scottish top flight.

"It actually can't get any worse, I don't think," he said. "There is no sponsor for the SPFL and, as much as it pains everyone, you have no option but to accept the crumbs of the Sky/BT deal."

And the accountant believes that clubs have to lobby for a bigger share of the pie.

There is never going to be a matched percentage of the money coming into the Scottish game, but Barnett has pointed out that even a bigger chunk of the cash would not be missed by those south of the border.

"There is more than £5billion pounds going into the Premiership," he said. "If you did the maths and came up with a simple split based on a straightforward population split, you'd have to say that we'd be looking for £500m.

"That is never going to happen, there is no way they would agree to that but I do think those charged with running the game have to even urge the numbers to go from £15m a year to £50m a year.

"Even that could be transformative for those of us involved in Scottish football and it is a drop in the ocean really when you look at what it would leave the English Premiership with.

"A sum like that would be more than adequate for us to invest in the game and improve the product.

"But right now there is a big onus on the clubs - not just to push for a bigger slice of the pie but also to try and make the teams and the games as attractive as possible."