In an hour-long interview with Jim White, Natalie Sawyer and Simon Jordan on Talksport, Barber paid tribute to chairman Bloom, and both board member Martin Perry and former chairman Dick Knight, in getting the club to its current healthy position, but he said it would be complacent and wrong to take Bloom’s support for granted.
He said, “Dick Knight and the people around him like Martin Perry did a great job in stabilising the club, saving it, and leading the campaign for a new stadium, but they didn’t have the money to build it.
“Tony Bloom then came along as a lifelong fan with an incredible commitment to build the stadium and the training ground, and to put in as much money as possible to get us to the position we’re in now.
“Ultimately, however, it’s our job to make sure the club is as sustainable as possible in the short, medium and longer term.
“That doesn’t mean getting Tony to write a cheque year after year. There aren’t many people looking to buy football clubs, so if you’ve got a good owner you have to keep them and look after them.
“The best way for me to look after Tony’s football club is to run the club as sensibly and sustainably as I can. That means getting a lot of things balanced and just right.
“From time to time, this will mean fans won’t always like what we have to do to achieve this, but it’s about making sure the club is standing on its own two feet as quickly as we can.”
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Attention turned to on-the-pitch matters, and the CEO and deputy chairman spoke about the club’s position in the bottom half of the Premier League, and Barber confirmed that he expects the fight for survival to go right down to the wire.
“We’ve worked hard to get where we are, so we’re not going to give it up easily. We’re one of eight, nine or even ten clubs that will feel slightly vulnerable right now,” he added.
“There’s still a lot of work to do as wins and goals are hard to come by in the Premier League, but we’re battling away. The results in the last two games, which saw us come back against West Ham and Watford, show there’s great spirit in the side.
“Graham [Potter] and his staff are very calm; in reality, we’ve been in this situation for pretty much the whole of the time we’ve been in the Premier League, but not once have we been in the bottom three.
“We’ve got a resilience about us, but we’re aware that we can’t take our eye off the ball and we have to keep looking for those points and finding wins.”
Barber was also quizzed about the decision to give Graham Potter a new six-year contract last November, and says the club has no regrets about extending the former Swansea’s man stay at the club so soon after his arrival last summer.
He said, “No regrets whatsoever. So often in football we talk about clubs being too short term in their thinking and their managerial appointments, but we took a different view which was to build some stability and make sure we give people long term confidence in the jobs we ask them to do.
“We feel Graham is an excellent coach that will be sought after in the game for many years. We’ve done our best to protect our investment in him and to make sure our club is as stable and as forward thinking as possible."