End of 2025/6 season review (written for NorRam magazine)

This article was drafted in May 2026, and originally submitted for NorRam, the magazine of the Norwegian Derby County supporters' club.

It’s over, for a couple of months at least, and while the break will do nobody any harm, there was certainly a tinge of regret as I trudged away from a sunny Pride Park after the final game of the season was lost to Sheffield United. 

It had been no regular loss. Derby were brilliant in the first half, and the game would probably have ended differently had it not been for the overwhelming pressure of the final day permutations. The Rams knew that a draw was no good to them, realistically they had to win to have a chance of making the play-offs, and they were clearly affected after a mistake from Joe Ward gifted Sheffield United an equaliser they had never looked like creating for themselves. 

But being involved in the final day drama was a lot of fun, and our outsider status meant that missing out didn’t feel like a huge blow.  

Very few people can realistically have expected Derby to be in a position to make the top six this season, and yet there we were, on Saturday 2 May, with an hour gone - sixth in the ‘as it stands’ table, just half an hour away from pipping Wrexham and Hull City to the post. It slipped away quickly and decisively after that, of course, with the Blades scoring twice in five minutes to kill our hopes stone dead, and Hull won against Norwich to make our result irrelevant in any case. Regardless, it was just brilliant to be involved in a situation as exciting as this as it unfolded. Having endured so much misery and underachievement in recent seasons, just to be in with a shout at the right end of the table represents more than enough progress for now.

Positives abound. First and foremost, John Eustace has continued his career pattern of taking unfancied clubs into the upper reaches of the Championship league table. With his influence, along with changes behind the scenes, the club’s recruitment - which for years had been variable, to put it mildly - has been highly effective, with a wise twin track approach of taking younger players with a view to developing them, plus seasoned pros who have been around the block and can be trusted to deliver.

The amount of former Blackburn Rovers players in the squad became remarkable by the end of January, but while Eustace was gathering his lieutenants as the senior influencing voices in the changing room, the club was also finding and securing talents from further afield.

In the end, the club’s slow start to the season was too much to overcome. Eustace had warned fans and media alike to expect that difficult opening few games, and was still complaining that his warnings hadn’t been heeded sufficiently before the final game of the season. The weakness of the squad that Eustace inherited was so extreme that it was always implausible for the club to improve it enough within two transfer windows to develop into serious promotion candidates. Derby did very well in the summer window, but the transfer hyperactivity sanctioned by David Clowes was certainly not a case of Mel Morris era excess being repeated - it was born of the necessity to avoid another relegation tussle, which was never a given and still looked a distinct possibility after ten games of the season had been played. 

Eustace was clearly hellbent on replacing nearly every player he had inherited as quickly possible, but with transfer business naturally taking time and injuries taking their toll, the manager still had to use some of Paul Warne’s signings in the early stages of the season. Kayden Jackson, Ryan Nyambe, Corey Blackett-Taylor and Kenzo Goudmijn were all moved out before the summer window closed, but all featured to a greater or lesser extent in the opening fixtures.

More controversially, Warne’s real talisman, and an enduring Derby cult hero, Ebou Adams was sold to Portsmouth in January, having played regularly in the first half of the season. Ebou suffered the public snub of being replaced as captain by Eustace’s favoured midfield leader, Lewis Travis, and while the duo did play together for a while, Adams had clearly been earmarked for replacement, and suffered the indignity of life as an unused substitute before a deal with Pompey was finally struck. It was ruthless, but the decision to move on by selling a 30 year-old midfielder whose prime virtues were always physical made logical sense as a case of head over heart. 

The biggest signing of the season, in every sense of the word, was Patrick Agyemang, and up until the Stoke City home game on Easter Monday, it looked to have paid off handsomely. Agyemang adapted to Championship life well, hit double figures for goals, and become feared as a menace to defenders with his combination of towering height, physical strength, terrifying speed and Paulo Wanchope-esque unpredictability. Opponents were soon reduced to simply grabbing hold of his shirt with both hands and hoping for the best, and officials too often seemed quite happy to side with them. The referee who booked Agyemang for being involved in a 50/50 tussle two minutes into a game was an extreme example of this, but there were many others. Nobody is saying that Big Pat is a choirboy, but when you can see his shirt being almost ripped off his back in the penalty area, from space, you would like to think that it might be deemed as an offence. 

Very sadly, with Agyemang primed for a spot in the United States squad for his home World Cup, the forward suffered a freak achilles tendon injury after landing awkwardly on the Pride Park turf. The expectation is for him to be absent until about Christmas, but how quickly he can get back up to something like his best form after that, and whether he will be able to play in the same exciting, explosive manner, remains to be seen.In a situation where the influx of new players was so large, it was unlikely that all of them would hit the ground running.

Ben Brereton Diaz endured a difficult start to his Derby career, at one stage failing to score or assist a goal in 18 games, but Eustace showed unyielding faith and the Chile international eventually hit a run of form to post more respectable numbers for the season, in the context of his being used as a wide bulldozer, rather than a central striker. He was also very durable and constantly available for selection, while most of the other senior players endured at least one significant injury during the campaign. 

Lewis Travis was absent for a run of games in the first half of the season, and was reportedly hampered by injury during the run-in, with Eustace listing him among three players who had taken painkilling injections to be available to play during the final few games. Carlton Morris suffered an injury after being bodychecked off the ball by a Watford defender, and the striker's three-month absence was probably the decisive factor in Derby eventually not making the play-offs.

We could go right through the ranks to tell the tales of woe, but in the end, only six outfield players managed to start more than 30 games for Derby this season. Even goalkeeper Jacob Widell Zetterstrom missed more than two months of action due to an unspecified illness, and with his deputy, Josh Vickers suffering from a fractured finger and then a groin injury, the third-choice ‘keeper, Richard O’Donnell - who had last been a regular number one for Rochdale in League Two, in 2022 - was pressed into service for seven starts and one substitute appearance.

In short, Eustace struggled to find a consistent, fit starting eleven throughout the season, with disruption striking every time it seemed that things were settling nicely.One of the things that Derby did very well in 2025/6 was to pick up loan signings who became important players for the team. That was a blessing in terms of boosting the side’s level, but creates an immediate challenge, in that all five loan players now need to be directly replaced. Eustace is on record as saying that he wants to keep “all the players”, but there is a gradient of likelihood in that happening. 

The least likely loan player to return, I think, is the fans’ favourite Bobby Clark [to my delight, Clark was the first player to sign in the summer window! - DCB], who was a big money signing for Red Bull Salzburg from Liverpool and something of a coup for the Rams to get. Clark would be an asset to any Championship squad, and there will surely be significant interest in him this summer. Could a club with the benefit of Premier League parachute payments be tempted to sign him on a permanent basis? 

Meanwhile, Crystal Palace have a decision to make over the future of David Ozoh, who has now been at Derby for two seasons - I’m sure the Rams would take him on a permanent basis, if the price was right. Brereton Diaz seems likely to made available for sale by Southampton, and Eustace will certainly be keen to make that move. Burnley’s Jaydon Banel is an exciting talent, but the Clarets have themselves been relegated to the Championship, so it seems to follow that he will be added to their own squad for next season, having proved himself to be an unpredictable attacking threat at this level. 

The final loan signing, who joined in the dying minutes of the January window, was Sam Szmodics. The 30 year-old certainly has no future with promoted Ipswich Town, having left the Tractor Boys under a cloud in January, and while Eustace will want to bring him back to Pride Park, it feels fair to say that Derby fans have not really seen the best of him yet. Szmodics is very much a Matej Vydra-type forward, who doesn’t contribute a huge amount in build-up play and essentially needs the attacking unit to be designed to give him the opportunities to finish. In theory, he should be able to link well with Morris, but more creativity would be needed in wide and central midfield areas if the number ten role in Eustace’s 4-2-3-1 is to be filled by a poacher like Szmodics.

In summary, Derby will be looking to sign around ten new players over the summer, but unlike last summer, they will be building on an existing spine, rather than effectively starting from scratch. That doesn’t mean that the recruitment job will be straightforward, but based on how well the club was able to stretch its budget last season, there are grounds for optimism that the Rams will be able to continue their trend of finding quality players for the level without spending a fortune. Expectations for next season will be higher than they have been for years, but even a repeat of this year’s eighth-place finish would be good enough to qualify for the newly-expanded play-offs. 

Certainly the feeling I got from attending recent games, and from going to the pub after the Sheffield United game with old friends, was that most people are feeling good about the present and the future. Sure, I’ve overheard plenty of little gripes, criticisms of the manager and people moaning about specific players, but that will always be the case as long as there is football to be played and watched. One of the biggest and best fanbases in the country finally has a club that is somewhere close to representing it properly. After a period of existential strife, now we are out on the other side.