ImARam2

For EFL league games, I believe a minimum of 10% of capacity has to be available to the away club, which would be 3,000.
For FA Cup games the minimum for away clubs is 15% of capacity.
There also has to be a percentage available for walk-up's, which if Derby have, say a limit of 22,000 season tickets + 3,000 away, which would leave approx. 5,000 available for non-season ticket holders/walk-up's.

What you chatting about?! Game of the season, night before valentines.. My Mrs is gonna be thrilled with her present this year 

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to finally have a decent, principled man like David Clowes at the helm, rather than some parasitic venture capitalist consortium, a human-rights abusing nation state or a deluded egomaniac millionaire.
No promise of on-the-pitch success could ever convince me to give up what we currently have for any of the latter.
I can't remember the last time I genuinely felt this, but it feels good to be a Ram.

David Clowes doesn't need any songs or chants as he's comfortable in just owning the club, financing the team, as and where he can, and watching the Rams, hopefully, getting promotion, either this season or next.
Remember, until May last year, he was just a season ticket holder in the North Stand and I doubt anyone knew who he was.
David Clowes is a Derby County supporter, just like me and 30,000 other Rams fans, but you don't have a song me you or me!!!

I went to work in Saudi Arabia (in the aviation industry) 40 years ago (1983) and trebled my UK basic salary overnight - and it was tax free!! I was also given a two-bedroomed apartment; free medical insurance and a free ticket back to the UK twice a year.
Although I had to work pretty damn hard in temperatures up to 40-50 Degs.C and 90% humidity, with many 12 hour shifts and the occasional 16 hours, but the I just thought of the money.
That bought me a very decent home back in Derbyshire, with no mortgage, as well as being able to afford holidays around the world which I would never have been able to do on my UK salary.
Yes, there were plenty of restrictions - such as no bars/pubs; cinemas or theatres, but that meant I was able to save more and after my 6 years contract finished I departed for other places.

I was 18 years old in 1970, football mad and went to every home game, and many away matches, which were great days out, usually on the train.
Six of us from Allestree FC went to Newquay in 1970, which was just brilliant - sun, sand, surfing and girls - what a time to be alive, but we all came back on the Friday evening to ensure we got to the Rams vs Man. Utd Watney Cup Final, at the BBG, which we won 4-0.
Memories which cannot be taken back - wonderful days

Completely understand the feeling of disappointment with McGoldrick leaving.
Can't completely understand the frustration with the club.
In terms of that departure, I'm not sure what we could have expected the club to do in that situation? 
The player has dropped a level, even took a pay cut to join Notts County, whilst our rivals may see that as some kind of embarrassment, they are clearly ignoring minor details such as seeing out his career at the club he supports.
Absolutely no embarrassment or shame in that transfer, in fact it's refreshing to see whilst the superstars of the game are chasing that Saudi money.
You can't help but wish him all the best and hope he has that fairy tale end to his career.
In terms of our own transfer activity or lack of so far, even if we were to sign 10 players today, our first pre season friendly is 5 weeks away.
We're not on the eve of the first game with no pre season training with the new players.
If you want to fully believe every single transfer rumour, that's more on you than the club itself, if you have been a football fan for any length of time during this social media era, you should know how it all works.
I personally wasn't expecting much if anything until the end of the month at the earliest. The transfer window itself doesn't even officially open until Wednesday.
I thought the forum would be also be pretty quiet without the drama.
Anyhow, McGoldrick, you won't be reading this but once again, thanks for everything, wish you all the best at Notts County, hope it works out for you and you can help lift them into League 1.

If you were a striker looking to play and score goals, and you saw you had Didzy ahead of you after just scoring 22 league goals. Would you be concerned about game time coming here? Him leaving can be spun in many different ways. It may not necessarily be a bad thing in the long run

Absolutely. There was a saying though, which went that you have a bucket of bull-s**t, and a bucket of money, and when one outweighed the other you left.
So I kept taking the bull-s**t until that outweighed the money.

I have used Arsenal as a great example and told David that we have an open invite from the club to go back down, they have set up a fantastic timeline of where the club came from and followed the history through to modern day, great use of lighting and sound adds to the experience, story boards as you walk through, it’s not about trophies it’s a celebration of the heritage, we can include our engineering links with the railways and the aero industry and make it about the people of Derby and how the club has been integral to their lives for the past 140 years, lots of photos and media, we had three screens running over the display on a loop which people just stood and watched, then importantly we will change the exhibits on a regular basis to keep it interesting and include themes such as eras or cup competitions through the season, it can be tied in with the ticket office, the yard and the club shop and of course ground tours, money can be made by the club, the good thing is that we are now up and running, lots of hard work over the years is now coming together, keep watching this space 👍🐏❤️

I share your wish for the club to be sustainable but don't believe that is inconsistent with expecting success or wanting to leave this division asap.
The revenue generated by this club would put us top 10 of the Championship with only the clubs with parachute payments & Sunderland (with their crowd numbers) significantly ahead of us. Obviously there will be a small handful of clubs spending well beyond their means (Bristol, Stoke. Parmo Parasites) but I think it should be perfectly achievable for Derbý to be both a sustainable & relatively successful club in the division above. The examples of Luton & Coventry further illustrate that approach is possible on much smaller revenue.
Not relying on spending means thinking shrewdly about recruitment & planning. I suspect in time Clowes' careful stewardship will get us a lot closer to the top division than Mel Morris ever managed.

I downloaded Wyscout for a trial run to see if it’s something that I would find of interest so did a little bit of a deep dive on the players we have been linked with so far. 
Anyone that knows the Wyscout platform will already be aware it’s an absolutely fascinating and groundbreaking tool for scouting players and teams. 
The most notable data point I came away with was that Ruben Rodrigues made the most ‘smart passes’ in the country last season with 131. A smart pass is defined as: A creative and penetrative pass that attempts to break the opposition's defensive lines to gain a significant advantage in attack.
To give you a reference point of just how high that is, not a single player in League Two had more than 40. Chaplin and Bannan ran away with it in League One with 58 each, third had 39. Mendez-Laing had 16 as our best midfielder in that regard, Knight second with just 12. The app also clips videos of several different indicators for each match - 40 minutes dedicated to just Ruben Rodrigues touches, 175 videos. He’s a talented football, a little bit of a grafter and based on what I’ve seen I would be surprised if he didn’t make the step up comfortably. The only reference point that I felt fell short was his impact on the counter attack, but he’s definitely got a bit of physicality. I think with a full, professional pre-season then he genuinely could be a diamond at this level. 

Had a think about this question over a few days and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that while I expect us to be challenging near the top, I’m not too bothered about promotion. I mean if it happens then great, I’d be ecstatic but a few things bother me.
1) I want us to be a sustainable club, I don’t want us to have a chairman who’s having to throw thousands, if not millions, into the club just to keep us afloat or chasing a near impossible dream. We are a community club and I don’t want us to have an idea that the finances of the club are an ownership problem rather than an overall problem we need to keep an eye on.
2) I want us to have an achievable plan in place to build something. We might have this already in place internally but I want us to have a plan to build something over x amount of seasons rather than just getting to the championship and then going from there. 
3) I have great concerns for the football pyramid as a whole, I can’t see the point in being a championship team with more overheads, trying to get to the prem where the gap between the have and have nots gets ever bigger.
Yes I’d love promotions and getting back to being a big club again, but I also like local ownership and I want us to be steady and stable. We need to be careful what we wish for and think about what’s next and how it’s going to be achieved as much as just having expectations.
 

Leeds & Leicester to be relegated with Southampton. Everton have enough to beat Bournemouth.

Leeds & Leicester to be relegated with Southampton. Everton have enough to beat Bournemouth.

1) Tommy Docherty - for destroying a good squad and replacing it with dross.
2) Billy Davies - famous for saying that as we held the play-off trophy aloft he thought it should have been Preston-coloured ribbons on the cup, not Derby’s. He then blamed Gadsby for limiting the transfer budget to explain his awful signings for the next season. He forgot to mention that he went on holiday for two weeks as soon as the transfer window opened, and by the tome he got back all the players we should have gone for had been signed by other clubs. He also tried to take on the Premiership with hoofball. 😡
Frank Lampard - yes, I know he got us to the play-off final, but with the loan players he was able to bring in we should walked the league. Strings were pulled to make him look good so he could go to Chelsea, who wouldn’t have been able to sign a complete rookie. And as we approached the final, Chelsea came sniffing, but he wouldn’t have bern able to leave the Rams if he had got us promoted. So he didn’t get us promoted. Come final day in his head he was already off, hence leaving Waghorn and young Jack on the bench, and only bringing them on when it was too late.
And having sold us down the river he then kept us hanging on until more of the transfer window had gone than Billy Davies had done.
Poor Phillip Cocu had no chance, only meeting his new squad halfway through their pre-season tour in America. And the only players he could sign were of the “you’ll have to do, there’s no-one else” category.  He didn’t stand a chance. And despite the desperation of the Joswiack and Beilick signings, Mel had blown huge amounts on the Lampard project, setting us up for the misery we are only now starting to come out of.As such I would put Lampard as our worse manager of all time because of what followed.
Even so, there are only two things about Lampard that I don’t like - both his faces.

Renewed my ticket last Friday, as well as buying a new one for my brother, so that's an extra one for next season.

Congratulations to Newcastle but the way their fans go on, you'd think they're the only club to have had hard times.
Ashley wasn't even that bad as far as owners go. When they went down to the Champo they came back up with 100+ points, they signed a £40m player under him and he sold them onto billionaires. Try having an owner who separates the club's assets from the club, does questionable accounting, withdraws funding and tries to sell the club to crypto fraudsters or fake sheikhs!
And Mel was at least acting (in his mind) in Derby's best interests. Try having an owner who literally robs the club like at Bury, the chap at Luton who tried to destroy the club and got them a 30 point deduction and the guy at Wimbledon who moved the team to another town!

As we already knew, the East Midlands is Red ❤️

RamsTV bought and paid for at £200 a season for we expats. That means I'll get to see all of the games. Certainly be over for between 6 and 8 games as well. 

Renewed my ticket last Friday, as well as buying a new one for my brother, so that's an extra one for next season.

Oh come on. Charlie George almost every game he played for us but Real Madrid stands out. Also saw the King v Huddersfield and was as impressed as the other posters.

I will second that. I was standing behind the Normanton End goal and in my mind's eye I can still see him racing with the ball towards the goal at the speed of light. I'm talking relatively. No pun intended.  Relative to players like Durban and Buxton. They were both quite skilful but to call them a bit slow is an understatement. Most defenders could give them a 20 yard start and still catch them. Hector was a totally new type of player. I'd never seen a Derby player run so fast with the ball under his control.
For me that Huddersfield game was the big bang in Derby's great success over the next decade.

Kevin Hector's home debut vs Huddersfield. He was fantastic and although Alan Durban got a hattrick and Derby won 4-3, all the talk was about 'Zac', the King.
I can honestly say, "I was there".

Kevin Hector's home debut vs Huddersfield. He was fantastic and although Alan Durban got a hattrick and Derby won 4-3, all the talk was about 'Zac', the King.
I can honestly say, "I was there".