Managing the media - John Eustace's battle for hearts and minds at Derby County

Published to Patreon on 12 April 2026. Here is a link to the league table on that date.

Football is the ultimate spectator sport, and everyone involved in it professionally will repeatedly be told quite forcibly - quite possibly in capital letters - how they are doing it all badly and wrong. Criticism isn't nice, and I'm not sure that anybody honestly relishes it, but in this industry, it genuinely would be better for any player or coach to just never look at social media, or search for themselves or their employer online, for fear of being driven out of their minds.

But let's be real, most of them are online in some form. For example, Dion Sanderson recently told BBC Radio Derby that he "just laughs" when he comes across negative comments. Dion certainly seems like the larger-than-life character who can shake it off. But I feel like he would be the exception, rather than proving a rule.

I certainly take criticism very much to heart, and it makes me furious when I feel like it's unfair. And based on a recurring factor in his press conferences over the last couple of months, I think it's fair to say that John Eustace does too.

As a manager, Eustace has a clear plan for everything he does, and that includes speaking to the media. His sole mission, when faced with a microphone, is to get his key messages over, deflect anything else with a platitude selected from his range of stock answers, and then get out.

And one of those key messages was crafted in the wake of Derby's awful start to this season and subsequent revival.

In his press conferences, Eustace has taken us back, again and again, to the ten-game mark of the season. In case you can't place that exactly, the tenth game was at Oxford United. You will now recall that the Rams had an absolute shocker at the Kassam Stadium, subsiding to an awful 1-0 defeat without ever looking like scoring. It could have been a lot worse.

That stinker left Derby with only eight points from the first 30 on offer, 21st in the early table, and their dire underlying performance was worrying in the extreme. It wasn't just the results that were a big concern, it was also the data. They had been outshot in every game, except for a scrambled 1-1 home draw with Charlton Athletic, and had finished four of the ten games with five or less shots. Whether you measured it in points on the board, expected goals, total shots, shots on target or possession, Derby were struggling badly.

On the plus side, however, we had managed to grit out a series of draws, despite finding Championship life so tough - most creditably, the 2-2 at Portman Road, a bizarre game to which the referee added 17 minutes of stoppage time, allowing Ipswich to eventually equalise in the 106th minute. The match prior to the Oxford trip was the encouraging 1-1 draw with Southampton, which saw Patrick Agyemang open his goalscoring account for the club.

Oxford away, then, felt like a big opportunity for a reset and for the team to finally get their season started in earnest. But when that chance was passed up so fecklessly, it certainly caused me to snap. I didn't hold back in my review of the game, which I concluded by suggesting that unless something changed quite quickly, then Derby were destined for another relegation battle.

As we know, something did change. At half-time in the next game, Sondre Langas clambered off the bench for the first time this season, and the Norwegian monster helped to inspire a critically important 1-0 win over Norwich City (who were themselves struggling horribly at the time, under the management of Liam Manning). With Langas slotting into a back three alongside Sanderson and Matt Clarke, Eustace finally hit on a shape that suited his available players, and the Rams powered on to a hugely impressive five wins in succession.

It wouldn't quite be right to say that they've never looked back since - and it's worrying that Langas has since been out injured again - but Derby's form has been strong enough since the Norwich win that it can be defined as the season's turning point. There has never been any chance of us being sucked back into the relegation dogfight.

I highly doubt that Eustace ever read my zero-star review of the Oxford defeat, but whatever media he was consuming at the time stung him enough that he has never forgotten the flak that came his team's way at the ten-game mark. And the reason he continually refers back to that nadir is to hammer home the point that we, as fickle fans and blowhard media commentators, are like weathervanes, pointing whichever way the wind is blowing, whereas he, Eustace, has to act as a force of nature, relentlessly, stoically fixed on the bigger picture, regardless of individual results.

One of his mantras is not getting too high about the highs, or too low about the lows, and his constant reminders about the post-Oxford mood music are designed to reiterate that the commentariat had made the fatal mistake of becoming overly negative, when there were underlying reasons for optimism that we just couldn't see. There were a lot of new players to bed in, for one thing, plus other players who weren't fully fit when they arrived or reported for pre-season. The starting line-ups for the pre-season friendlies were extremely weak, and Eustace used the start of his first press conference of the season, before the trip to Stoke City, to warn everyone that the team could be in line to start the season slowly.

But that was in sunny early August. The Oxford game was played in mid-October. The transfer window had long since closed, and Eustace had been backed strongly, by the standards of a non-parachute Championship team. Most of his new signings were available to face the Yellows, and most of the players in the starting XI at the Kassam were Eustace's picks. Yet despite the significant investment, we weren't seeing any progress at all and hadn't won at home in five attempts. That inevitably fuelled frustration.

The manager's retort is that his new players simply weren't up to speed at that stage. And his wider point is that the doubters - myself included, at the stage he is referring to - hadn't taken everything all factors into account and were simply too blind to see what he could see, which was that the ground had been laid for us to have a decent season. Eustace likes to remind us of it because he knows that another slump in form will inevitably happen at some point, and he doesn't want any fan or media negativity to seep into the way the players see themselves when it does.

Just under half of the Championship's clubs have changed manager this season, with Watford and West Bromwich Albion having done so twice. I try to keep tabs on this on our results grid, although it's getting harder and harder to track, as managerial tenures get shorter and shorter. But there is zero threat to Eustace's job.

As the season has ticked on, the points tally has ticked up steadily and is now miles in excess of last season's total. Persistently substandard home form through the first half of the season has finally perked up, with the Rams winning their last five games at Pride Park. Derby's overall home record is now mid-table standard.

With the upturn in home results, the overall mood has shifted to become significantly more positive and supportive. Perhaps the best marker for this - and for Eustace's militant 'treat triumph and disaster both the same' worldview - is the overall vibe around Ben Brereton Diaz (AKA BBD, or "Big Bad Diaz").

By the turn of the year, the Chile forward had endured a run of 18 games - more than one third of a whole season - without contributing either a goal or an assist. He had been dropped to the bench just once in that time, and at least some fans were sick of him and not afraid to make it known. When he finally scored an equalising goal in the 2-1 defeat to Wrexham at Pride Park to finally end the drought, I honestly think he was within a split second of giving the fans a bit back, before catching himself and just standing stock still, not celebrating.

Since then, Brereton Diaz has contributed steadily, to the point where the South Stand resurrected the old Gary Teale song in his honour - "he used to be shite, but now he's all right". Big Bad's record is now seven goals and three assists in 36 league appearances - not earth-shattering, but not disastrous either, which makes the chant exactly right, in a way that it probably never quite was for Teale.

Eustace would argue that the Big Bad Renaissance justifies his judgement both in signing Brereton Diaz on loan, and in sticking by the player despite his prolonged struggles. I'm not sure how many managers would have persisted so faithfully, even stubbornly, with a player to the extent that Eustace did. He was fully invested in Brereton Diaz, defended him resolutely, and carried on picking him regardless of the noises off. We couldn't see it. He could. Will he try to sign the player permanently in the summer? Almost certainly, if it's financially possible, and I am sure that such a move would carry a lot more public support now than it did in January.

The atmosphere for home games has been markedly improved of late, particularly after Derby buried Blackburn in a second half goal blitz, which was the kind of experience we had been starved of for too long. But Eustace knows all too well that the current favour he is granted could just as easily be withdrawn by an impatient fanbase and its attendant media. He has a squad to cajole, encourage and get the best out of, but that's only the half of the job at a club with a large and vociferous fanbase, which bears the mental scars of suffering through too many on and off-field crises in recent history.

Eustace is a manager who needs something to rail again. If Paul Warne was fuelled by coffee as black as petrol, Eusty has to feel like he's got something to prove. And that's understandable when you consider his previous experiences. The way in which he was cast aside by a conceited and naive Birmingham City hierarchy was embarrassing. The Blues certainly got what they deserved afterwards, but unsurprisingly, Eustace hasn't forgotten about it - Derby's recent win against Birmingham allowed him to troll them by referring to the "no fear football" his side had played in the first half, in direct reference to the infamous statement that Tom Wagner and his lackeys posted after elbowing Eustace aside for Wayne Rooney.

But Eustace clearly understands that he is not seen as an exciting, charismatic, or glamorous figure. In football, public image matters. It carries you a long way. As Rooney, Steven Gerrard or Frank Lampard could attest, it gets you jobs. Birmingham fired Eustace because he wasn't a big or glamorous enough name for them. They spoke about installing a 'winning mentality' and a 'culture of ambition'. The obvious implication of Birmingham's statement was that they didn't believe that Eustace's football was exciting, progressive or attacking enough for them or their supporters, or at least some theoretical set of new supporters that they believe they can attract to a huge new stadium they plan to build in the future ("60,000? You're having a laugh", as the South Stand put it the other week).

The vanity involved in Birmingham's treatment of Eustace was mind-blowing. David Clowes is not that kind of man - but Clowes might not be at Derby forever, and if the fans turn against a manager, the pressure will mount on even the most patient and enlightened of owners to give them somebody new.

From day one, Eustace has spoken about the club as being a 'family'. He wants everyone to be a part of the family, but it's one for which he serves as a patriarchal authority figure. He is no pedagogue - he has no interest whatsoever in educating us in what he regards as the confidential nuances of the game - that's not part of the job, as far as he is concerned. He just demands our loyalty.

Critical noises off in the media are disloyal, and hence a problem. Rather than shaking it off, Eustace's approach is to put time and effort into managing the issue, now that he is in a sufficiently secure position to answer back to those who have presumed to criticise in the past.

He wants our trust. And on the basis of what he has achieved so far, he believes he's earned it.