Sign(ings) o' the Times - reviewing Derby County's recent recruitment

Originally published on Patreon - 17 May 2026

It's a story you all know. Back in the 2010s, Derby County had a lot of money to spend on players, and they wasted it.

There's an alternative reality where the money that Mel Morris poured into the club funded the Premier League promotion that he (and we) craved, then Derby kicked on to consolidate as a middleweight top flight competitor. Instead, the scouting and recruitment infrastructure was simply never in place for the club to make the most of the millions.

It's enough to make you wince even now. While smaller, but more agile and much better informed clubs like Brighton, Brentford and Bournemouth were busy scouring the global market for gems and trading their way to the top - where they all remain very happily to this day - Derby failed to take full advantage of Morris' cash, paying some absurd premiums to extract players from other Championship clubs instead of finding better value elsewhere, and consistently falling chronically short whenever they did try to import talent from abroad.

A while back, I did a profit and loss estimate of the club's business since 2013/4. Just as an example, here's a snapshot of the madness of 2015/6 (separately, I'll make my whole sheet available to members of the League of Gentlefolk as a download)....

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