For Jack, in the studio, there were “ugly scenes” after the last game, “people getting at each other… emotions going mad… it wasn’t pleasant”.
George, on the line from Loughborough, said he was reluctantly in the sack-the-manager “brigade” because “he’s had enough time” and “the football is dire”. Mike, from Chaddesden, agreed, adding “we’ve gone backwards”.
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Eric Steele, a former goalkeeper and goalkeeping coach at the club, was more measured but he could not have been clearer that Tuesday night’s home fixture against Exeter City was a “massive, massive game”.
“Great!”, I thought, as that was the game I was driving to while listening to the above, that day’s edition of BBC Radio Derby’s Daily Rams podcast.
But that wasn’t my biggest takeaway from the pod, which was half an hour of almost undiluted gloom.
My overriding thought was that Derby County are a football club once more, with football club problems and football club passions.
The fans were upset because their club, probably the biggest in League One, were 11th in the table, 13 points behind leaders Portsmouth, having just lost 1-0 at Shrewsbury Town. They were frustrated that the players signed this summer had not taken the division by storm, and they were very concerned that Paul Warne, the manager who was meant to guarantee promotion back to the Championship, was floundering.
This was my first visit to Derby since I saw them concede in the 90th minute to lose 2-1 to Queens Park Rangers. That was 23 months ago. Wayne Rooney was the manager that evening and his team was full of homegrown players who had obvious talent but who matched their boss in terms of experience for the task at hand.
And what a task it was. Having narrowly avoided relegation from the Championship the season before, Derby had been docked 12 points for going into administration in September 2021 and nine more points two months later for breaking the EFL’s accounting rules.
They beat Bournemouth immediately after that second points deduction and then drew at Fulham, but they were still bottom of the table when QPR turned up, with the asterisked total of one point from 19 games. Without the penalties, they would have been 19th — an achievement given the club’s off-field problems.
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I did not listen to any Derby County podcasts that day but if I had I am sure I would have heard defiance, not despair, as that was the mood in the city back then.
“Despite everything — the crippling debts, the deducted points, the late winners conceded at home — they still believe in Derby,” was the intro of the piece I wrote the following day.
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It was one of more than 30 pieces I wrote or co-wrote about Derby between July 2020 and July 2022. More than an article a month for two years and not a single one was about how the team was playing, a new signing or a rising star.
I wrote about the mysterious loan the club’s multi-millionaire former owner had taken to buy the club’s stadium from himself in order to create an artificial profit that would prevent a breach of the league’s spending rules. I reported on three different failed bids for the club from timewasters who have either gone to ground or are awaiting trial for fraud. And I explained the numerous rows with the league and other clubs over the loopholes Derby had explored to hide years of overspending.
During this period, any podcast about the club would have only had time to discuss the team after it had spent 20 minutes talking about that week’s big news on amortisation, insolvency law or when the saviour of the moment was going to deliver the funds they promised.
Then, two summers ago, I wrote one about the most important press release ever issued in the club’s 139-year history: “Derby County saved…”
Local property developer, and lifelong fan, David Clowes had stepped up to rescue the club from liquidation, shelling out a sum in the region of £60million to settle the debts and buy back Pride Park Stadium from Mel Morris, the club’s previous custodian. It was a remarkable amount to pay for a hollowed-out club that would be rebuilding in English football’s third tier.
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Derby County are one of the English league’s 12 founding members, two-time champions of England and a club with top-flight infrastructure, but they were also still losing £1million a month in 2022 and had only a handful of players under contract. Morris, for all his mistakes, walked away from his eight-year ownership £200million worse off.
But confirmation of Clowes’ arrival meant my work was done. Apologies, Derby fans, it’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that I don’t do good news. I do doom and gloom, and not the “sack the manager” doom and gloom, either. I do the existential “your club could disappear” stuff.
But don’t panic! The grim reaper is not back on your beat. He is just curious to see how being “saved” is going, and that curiosity was piqued by an event that might seem inconsequential but actually says a lot about the club’s past, present and future.
Last month, the EFL called all 72 of its clubs to a meeting to discuss the so-called “new deal for football”, a proposal from the Premier League to increase the amount of money the top division shares with the rest of the pyramid, in return for cost controls, calendar changes and a few other tweaks of interest to the country’s richest clubs. If it is approved, it could finally make clubs like Derby sustainable in the EFL.
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That the EFL chose to hold this meeting at Pride Park Stadium, a ground its stadium valuation expert once called “bog standard”, is a testament to how far a Clowes-led Derby have come in terms of their relations with the rest of the industry in 15 months.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say Derby had become the least popular club in the league under Morris, in terms of relations with the other clubs and the league, and that unpopularity reached new lows during the season Derby spent in administration, when every week seemed to bring a new argument.
Derby were not the first club to spend too much money chasing promotion to the Premier League but they were the first to try the sell-the-stadium-to-ourselves trick and they are still the only English club to use a legal but unusual approach to accounting for their transfer spending that made the application of league-wide spending rules very difficult.
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But even before those controversies, Morris had been EFL Marmite by moaning about the league’s TV contract while continuing to sign expensive players and high-profile managers. Some owners liked his straight-talking manner and recognised a trier when they saw one. Others thought he was full of it.
The latter is also how many viewed the club’s chief executive Stephen Pearce after it emerged that the former accountant had played a central role in the contentious amortisation strategy that would ultimately cost Derby nine points in November 2021. The fact Pearce had been one of the Championship’s three elected representatives on the EFL board added to the sense of disappointment.
But Pearce, who joined Derby from Chelsea in 2013, is still there. He could have been sacked by the administrators in September 2021 as a cost-saving measure but they needed someone to run the club. And Clowes could have let him go to signal a fresh start in July 2022 but he needed someone to run the club, too.
Pearce knows that some critics will always distrust him for his actions during the Morris era, and he realises he will never win many of these people over, but he was an affable host on Tuesday and he answered every question I asked while we watched Derby start nervously, score a good goal and then take control against an out-of-sorts Exeter.
Derby ran out 2-0 winners but they could and should have scored more, which has been the story of the season. A win is a win, though, and the three points lifted Derby to eighth, two points off the play-off spots, with a game in hand over sixth-placed Blackpool. And to cap a good evening, leaders Portsmouth drew and second-placed Oxford United lost.
Nat's off the mark for the season ✅#DCFC
— Derby County (@dcfcofficial) October 25, 2023
Crisis, what crisis?
Pearce did not go quite that far — he knows the side have underperformed and he understands the frustration of a fanbase more used to fighting for promotion to the Premier League — but he believes the club is moving forward on a variety of fronts that should stop me ever again having to write about them every month.
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He talked a lot about the importance of maintaining the Category One status of the club’s famous academy.
Under English football’s Elite Player Performance Plan, academies are separated into four tiers, or categories, with one being the highest, four the lowest. “Cat ones” have to meet high standards for their facilities and coaching, but that enables them to play in the country’s best development league, the PL2, and brings £1.3million in support from the Premier League. That subsidy is welcome but keeping up with the Joneses of the player-development world costs Derby another £4million they must find.
Tuesday’s team sheet showed the benefit of running such a top-end programme, as there were three academy graduates in the side, Max Bird, Eiran Cashin and Louie Sibley. They were all part of the side that beat Bukayo Saka’s Arsenal in the final of the Premier League’s U18 championship in 2019, a victory that earned them a spot in the UEFA Youth League in 2019-20.
Three weeks after that final, the seniors, then led by Frank Lampard, lost the Championship play-off final to Aston Villa. The Derby team that day featured Mason Mount and Fikayo Tomori on loan from Chelsea and elder statesmen Ashley Cole and Tom Huddlestone.
It was Derby’s second defeat in a play-off final in six years and whichever team lost that day was going to face a season of financial retrenchment. Villa won 2-1, went up and their U.S.-based billionaire backers completed a full takeover.
For Derby, the losers at Wembley, they went into a 12th season in the Championship, with former Barcelona star Phillip Cocu in charge. The season was heading south until Rooney arrived as another big-money signing. He temporarily steadied the ship but the engine room was already on fire when Covid-19 struck.
While Villa have European games to play and meet Derby’s fierce rivals Nottingham Forest in the world’s most successful domestic league on Sunday week, Derby have games against Stevenage and Northampton Town to look forward to.
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But, as Pearce pointed out more than once, there is no point going on about the past. He is more concerned about how the club recovers from the damage administration caused at every level of the club.
For example, last season’s under-21 team won only one point in the entire PL2 season, and this season’s group have only one point after six games. It is hardly a surprise when you consider the amount of talent that left the academy’s Moor Farm home once Derby ran into financial treacle. With Morris appearing to struggle to meet the wage bill, Derby sold Kaide Gordon to Liverpool and Sekou Kaba, James Scanlon and Malachi Sharpe to Manchester United in February 2021.
And then, during administration, more family silver went out the door: True Grant to Manchester City, Omari Kellyman to Aston Villa, Luke Plange to Crystal Palace, Dylan Williams to Chelsea. Holding on to young players wanted by Premier League sides is always a challenge for a team in League One but it becomes impossible when the club’s sole focus is survival.
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The challenge for new academy manager Matt Hale, hired this summer from Southampton, will be to restock Moor Farm and it must be done the old-fashioned way, via good scouting and coaching, as Derby cannot afford the sums other cat-one academies are paying for teenagers.
But Pearce also talked about the progress that has been made in making Derby a destination for talent again. The women’s team, currently mid-table in the third tier of their pyramid, are now integrated with the men’s set-up. They beat Nottingham Forest away from home earlier this month and will host the return fixture at Pride Park in March.
I asked him about the new colours and messaging I could see around the stadium and he explained it was part of a new “club identity” released in the summer to mark the first anniversary of the Clowes takeover. Following a consultation with staff, the club came up with six colours that celebrated an aspect of Derby’s rich history.
This might sound a bit W1A, the mockumentary about the BBC, but when I spoke to fans in the hospitality lounges before the game, they all said the club had made a noticeable effort to get closer to the community that rallied around the club when it looked like it might disappear. I heard the words “culture” and “values” more often than I usually hear outside of HR presentations.
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Pride Park looked good, too. By coincidence, Exeter’s 300 fans and I had come to the debut of Derby’s giant video screen in the northwest corner of the ground. A member of staff told me the club had not publicised this because they were worried some fans would complain they should be spending the money on the team.
But the fact that fans might complain about something as normal as this is progress. Two years ago, there was no money for anything other than keeping the lights on.
There is still much to be done, though. There is a widely-held belief among fans that the club is short of football know-how. There are two parts to this: one that Pearce and Clowes acknowledged (when I spoke to him after the game), one that confuses them.
The latter is the frequent calls to appoint a director of football. Neither Pearce nor Clowes understands where this has come from, as it is not something they have discussed or believe is necessary. Their best guess is it is an assumption based on Warne’s job title being head coach, not manager, with head coaches often working under directors of football.
Instead they are going with a six-strong “football executive team”, comprised of Pearce, Warne, Hale, chief medical officer Amit Pannu, head of football development and performance Ross Burbeary and head of recruitment Mark Thomas. Like Hale and Warne, who arrived last September, Burbeary and Thomas are relatively new appointments.
Pearce and Clowes did agree with the second part of the Derby being a bit thin on top theory, though, and this relates to the club’s board currently having only two directors, Clowes and Richard Tavernor, the finance director at the owner’s family business, Clowes Developments. The club is looking for three more directors, a chair and two non-executives. Ideally, they will bring complementary skill sets, with the chair likely to have a legal background, and the other two having backgrounds in business and/or high-performance sport.
Clowes is also determined to introduce a fan advisory board. In fact, he is hoping this will be up and running soon, with three places reserved for the elected representatives from the three largest fans’ groups and three more places available to representatives from other groups and the wider fanbase. They will be selected by a three-person panel, with a club representative on it and two independent voices.
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However, the club has run into some opposition here, with some fans saying the board will be toothless and unrepresentative. This has surprised the Football Supporters’ Association, which has been advising the club on the idea and told The Athletic it was really impressed with it, urging its opponents to give it a chance.
I suggested to Pearce that the real problem here might be him and that some fans will just never trust him. He did not disagree but I detected no indication he was about to chuck it in and say, “What’s the point?”
And, just to address topic No 1 on the podcast, I also detected zero signs of any wavering in the support for Warne from Clowes or Pearce.
When they made the seemingly harsh decision to replace interim manager Liam Rosenior with Warne at the start of last season, they did so for the simple reason that Warne was three out of three when it came to getting promoted from League One — having led Rotherham United to the Championship in 2018, 2020 and 2022, when they also won the EFL Trophy — whereas Rosenior was clearly talented but inexperienced. Rosenior is now manager at Championship side Hull City.
As far as the club’s hierarchy was concerned, last season was a free hit for Warne. They were still under a registration embargo and the players were not his picks. Derby were seventh in the table when he arrived and that is where they finished — one point and one place outside the play-off spots.
For a time, it looked like the 50-year-old former midfielder was going to make it four out of four for League One promotion campaigns, as Derby went on a 15-game unbeaten run in the winter and he was named January’s manager of the month. But a wobble in March and defeat on the last day consigned them to only their fifth season (out of 120) in the third tier.
Most fans seemed to agree that last season was a warm-up for what was meant to be a glorious march towards silverware and a return to the Championship this season. A dozen signings this summer only added to the heightened expectations and the bookmakers duly responded by slapping the favourites’ tag on the Rams.
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Since then? Well, it’s been… underwhelming. Derby lost their first three home games, including one to Blackpool in the Carabao Cup, but then put together a seven-game unbeaten run until the Shrewsbury defeat. A few steps backwards, some forwards, then one big one backwards again. Not so much as a march as a line dance.
The “ugly scenes” referred to earlier came at the end of the match when captain Conor Hourihane, who inadvertently scored Shrewsbury’s winner, tried to placate the away support. He told them he was “trying his best” while they made it clear his best was not good enough.
That is probably a fair assessment of the season so far. Nobody is disputing that Warne and his team are not trying their best; it just has not clicked yet. Warne has acknowledged that.
The good news is that Derby have 33 more league games to play, a manager with a great track record at this level, plenty of good players and, based on Tuesday’s game, fantastic support.
A fresh look at last night's fine goals! 👌#DCFC
— Derby County (@dcfcofficial) October 25, 2023
But the bigger point must surely be that this is all good news at the moment when you consider where Derby could be now. If Clowes, a very reluctant owner, had not stepped forward, a Derby phoenix team could be playing its first season in the ninth tier.
And in Clowes, they have the perfect custodian. His family is worth £350million but he is not doing this to make money, to scratch a competitive itch or show off. He is doing it because he loves his club and realised that if he didn’t save it, nobody would.
“After the hideous uncertainty of administration, all Derby County fans will be forever grateful to David Clowes for buying the club and saving us from extinction,” is how Hilary Leam, the chair of the Rams Trust puts it.
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After the game, I went to meet him in directors’ lounge. He was saying goodbye to a director from Exeter and there were several more guests he wanted to thank for coming — and a cheese course to finish — so I didn’t want to keep him long.
But he assured me that paying the bills had not diminished his enjoyment of watching Derby play and he would never do anything that did not help the club. He did not sound like the kind of guy who needs the last word but what he said perfectly he summed up my impressions of the evening as I left.
“We’re just humble people, who want to do things the right way and only want the best for the club.”
(Top photo: Ian Hodgson/PA Images via Getty Images)
