AFTER watching Glasgow Warriors come within five points of making history by reaching the quarter finals of the European Champions Cup, Scottish Rugby chief executive Mark Dodson has promised that money will be made available to bolster the squad for next season's challenge.

The Warriors are set to lose scrum-half Niko Matawalu and winger/full-back Sean Maitland to Bath and London Irish respectively at the end of this season, but Dodson has now pledged that the gaps they leave will be filled and that Glasgow will be able to sign players of the requisite calibre to take their places.

"We will be signing players in the next few months," said Dodson at a briefing at BT Murrayfield yesterday. "There will be replacements. The fact that Sean and Niko are going should not be conflated with any budgetary issues. It is a squad in transition."

However, Dodson refused to provide a figure for the funds that will be made available to head coaches Gregor Townsend at Glasgow and Alan Solomons at Edinburgh to boost their chances of challenging the top sides in the Champions Cup and the Guinness PRO12.

"It will depend," he explained. "But there is an opportunity to sign more players if required. In a World Cup year we have a very different challenge because, potentially, there could be up to 25 domestic players in the World Cup squad of 31. That's going to mean a deeper call on our clubs and therefore we will probably have to have deeper squads."

Amidst growing speculation that Townsend might also be tempted to move to pastures new, Dodson said he did not expect the Warriors coach to be on his way in the near future.

"Gregor is tied in for a period of time," said Dodson, who has held the top job at Murrayfield since September 2011. "His contract runs for another couple of years. He has a job to do here and I think he sees it as anything but finished. He is loving his time in Glasgow.

"He will be asked about [moving on]. There are not that many outstanding young coaches in the world rugby, and Gregor is clearly one of them. But I am not expecting Gregor to move any time soon. I don't see any reason why he would."

In comparison to the experiences of previous chief executives at Murrayfield, Dodson's time at the SRU has been a period of relative calm. The debt burden, that once stood above £25 million, had already been significantly during former chief executive Gordon McKie's time in charge by the time he arrived, and it now stands at around £9 - 10 million.

And Dodson outlined an intriguing new revenue stream for the organisation - letting their footballing counterparts use Murrayfield if they decide to quit Hampden.

The Scottish Football Association's lease on the National Stadium in Glasgow ends in 2020 and chief executive Stewart Regan confirmed last summer he is "exploring all options".

Murrayfield staged Celtic's Champions League qualifiers with KR Reykjavik and Legia Warsaw this season after Parkhead was ruled out during the Commonwealth Games, while Hearts have also hosted big European nights there.

Dodson said: "We hosted Glasgow Celtic when they couldn't use their own ground during the Commonwealth Games, so we're open to the idea of football being played here.

"We haven't had any official conversations with the SFA but clearly if there is a desire from them to come and play at Murrayfield then we would happily listen to whatever proposal they put forward.

"I do think the issue in Scotland is that we have got too many big stadiums and not enough small ones.

"So it is difficult to make all of the bigger ones financially viable.

"If you have any kind of stadium - indoor or outdoor - it is the number of dark nights that are the problem and you need to use it as much as you possibly can.

"Something like Murrayfield is such an expensive building to maintain so to have it empty is not what you want. So we're always thinking of ways to improve the Murrayfield estate so it becomes a better and more viable financial option for us."

In playing terms, Dodson's main achievement has been to oversee a sharp improvement in the fortunes of Glasgow, in terms of attendances as much as results. Edinburgh reached the semi-final of the Heineken Cup a few months after he took office, dipped badly for a couple of seasons, but now appear to be on the rise again.

The national team have not fared so well. Andy Robinson's reign as coach ended with an ignominious loss to Tonga, and there was no great improvement under caretaker coach Scott Johnson. Hoever, there have been green shoots since Vern Cotter took over last June, with Scotland winning five of the seven matches played on the New Zealander's watch, and Dodson believes that two November victories have given the side a solid platform for the forthcoming RBS 6 Nations Championship.

Dodson said: "We have three games at home and I think we have to kick on from where we were in the autumn. Everyone was pleased with the way the team played and executed Vern's systems. We go into the six Nations with optimism."

It would require an even greater degree of optimism to believe that Dodson's notorious target - spelled out at the 2012 annual meeting of the SRU - that Scotland will win this year's World Cup is in much danger of being met, but he refused to apologise for setting the bar so high.

"I don't regret saying that," he said firmly. "I think everybody now understands that I was trying to point to the fact that this is what we should be aiming to do. I think people realise it was the right thing to do.

"Since I've been here people have told me we can't do a number of things. We can't get naming rights for the stadium, we can't be competitive at the top level, we can pay down the debt. But we've done all these things.

"We have recalibrated peoples expectations of what Scotland is capable of doing."