ImARam2

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".

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".

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".

Although I was absolutely  ecstatic over beating Leeds, however, for clear class the play-off 2nd leg semi-final against Brighton was pure joy to watch, from a team that should have just murdered QPR in the final.
That poxy, last minute goal was heart breaking.

Although I was absolutely  ecstatic over beating Leeds, however, for clear class the play-off 2nd leg semi-final against Brighton was pure joy to watch, from a team that should have just murdered QPR in the final.
That poxy, last minute goal was heart breaking.

Although I was absolutely  ecstatic over beating Leeds, however, for clear class the play-off 2nd leg semi-final against Brighton was pure joy to watch, from a team that should have just murdered QPR in the final.
That poxy, last minute goal was heart breaking.

Although I was absolutely  ecstatic over beating Leeds, however, for clear class the play-off 2nd leg semi-final against Brighton was pure joy to watch, from a team that should have just murdered QPR in the final.
That poxy, last minute goal was heart breaking.

Although I was absolutely  ecstatic over beating Leeds, however, for clear class the play-off 2nd leg semi-final against Brighton was pure joy to watch, from a team that should have just murdered QPR in the final.
That poxy, last minute goal was heart breaking.

Although I was absolutely  ecstatic over beating Leeds, however, for clear class the play-off 2nd leg semi-final against Brighton was pure joy to watch, from a team that should have just murdered QPR in the final.
That poxy, last minute goal was heart breaking.