No Time for Complacency On Derby County’s Future
On March 27, 2019, two founding Football League clubs battled it out at Wembley in the Championship Play-Off Final. Aston Villa and Derby County were both gambling financially to reach the promised land of the Premier League. The game was dubbed ‘the £170 million fixture,’ given the lucrative financial prize of top-flight status at stake. Villa prospered, beating a sub-par Derby 2–1, following some questionable team selection and goalkeeping.
Villa are now tucked safely in the Premier League’s mid-table, signing top Brazil internationals and pulling back two goal deficits against Manchester United. Derby face almost certain relegation to the UK’s third football tier and are selling first-team players for peanuts to teams divisions below them to stave off the club’s extinction.
All of which is to say: fine margins can matter a lot in football. And don’t Derby know it. Last week, the club’s manager Wayne Rooney spoke of the imminent likelihood of a preferred bidder being announced that would begin the process of a takeover lifting the club out of administration. There was even talk of signing players again, bolstering the on-pitch heroics of his assembled band of youngsters and old-timers, who’ve given Derby a remarkable and unlikely hope of overturning their enforced 21-point point deduction and actually surviving in the Championship.
But all that hope was extinguished at a Thursday EFL board meeting. The governing body rejected Derby’s administrators’ plans for dealing with creditors. Derby’s admins (by all accounts) thought the club didn’t need to worry much about compensation suits from Middlesbrough and Wycombe Wanderers, two teams who believe Derby’s past rule-breaking cost them financially.
The EFL begged to differ. Suggesting these should be treated as potential ‘football creditors,’ whatever the merit of the cases and whatever the written contents of the EFL’s own rule book, Derby’s takeover path stalled, leaving the administrators having to scramble to find funds to prove the club can survive the season, at the risk of being expelled from the Football League.
Most Derby fans, including me, accept that former owner Mel Morris sought to bend the rules in chasing the Premier League dream. The club were punished this season with a 12-point penalty for Morris putting the club into administration and then another 9 when Morris’s ‘cute’ amortisation policy was eventually found to have helped the club skirt historic financial fair play (FFP) restrictions.
We came to peace with these punishments and turned our ire to the source of the mismanagement. Derby have had two years now of embargoes on transfers of ever-changing stringency on top of these points penalties, all of which has meant we were resigned to our fate — the near-certainty of plummeting down a division, having survived last season by the skin of our teeth on the final day.
Yet, remarkably, results on the pitch have been much better than expected. And that has induced some Old Testament sentiment for justice from some other clubs and supporters — a belief that where Derby are concerned, ‘they haven’t suffered enough.’
Middlesbrough charge that absent Derby’s Financial Fair Play breach, Boro would have entered the 2019 play-offs and may have prevailed. Wycombe believe that Derby held up the process on justice, costing the Chairboys their place in the Championship by delaying the points penalty from last season to this. Both such claims now risk not only creating an insurmountable barrier to Derby’s takeover, but opening a can of worms such that football outcomes are increasingly decided in courts or arbitration proceedings rather than on the pitch.
Whatever the rights and wrong of these particular cases, they pose a threat that we supporters are unwilling to take on the chin: of Derby’s extinction. And what seems clear from today’s reports is that it is within the EFL’s gift to end the threat that these cases might kill the club.
The enemy of a good outcome here is complacency. Whenever a club struggles financially, there’s always a belief that something will come along or someone will buckle. That, when push comes to shove, a saviour will step in to insulate the club in peril, regardless of its status or the underlying finances. But Bury were a cautionary tale against misguided obstinance and wishful thinking. Derby and the EFL appear at a genuine impasse. With the club running out of options, the league must ask itself: will it let a founding member club go to the wall for the sake of these speculative lawsuits?
Football, like most economic activity, is rightly governed by creative destruction. The league’s governance is supposed to ensure, however, that those gales are channelled into teams rising and falling through the leagues via promotions and relegations, rather than clubs being created or going bust. Derby’s administrators believe they have a financial backer ready and waiting to save the club, with the Boro and Wycombe suits the final hurdle to cross. So, again: will the EFL really let a 137-year-old club die with its future within reach, or will cool heads prevail?
There’s a lot at stake here. Not just for the broader community around Derby or for the supporters’ lives. HMRC stands to lose a lot of money if the club gets liquidated. So while I’d not usually call for politicians getting involved in sports regulation, the EFL needs to know the strength of feeling about the impact of its decisions. Hence the petition for the sports minister Nigel Huddleston to demand clarification from the EFL, and the calls for DCMS Secretary Nadine Dorries and Derbyshire MPs to meet with the parties to encourage a swift resolution.
The most important thing to remember right now is this need for urgency. It’s easy at times like this to get bogged down in whataboutery. And, yes, there are certainly bigger parliamentary and football governance questions to address afterwards, such as: whether, in a world with Premier League parachute payments, the EFL’s Financial Fair Play rules help, or distort competition; or how the EFL will deal with the financial impact of COVID as other clubs struggle financially; or whether the league’s internal set up risks club vested interests capturing the disciplinary process; or whether the league’s financial rules need tightening; or, indeed, whether Parliament’s recent law change on ‘football creditors’ will imperil other teams down the line.
But it’s important that those questions really are left for tomorrow. Derby fans know better than most that marginal outcomes at crucial times can fundamentally alter the course of the club’s history. There’s a lot of room for historic errors in the coming weeks.
