Who was the worserest owner(s) of Derby County

[CornwallRam]

2 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

Fair play for putting your neck out & outlining your argument but couldn't disagree more.

The Academy is not the reason we are in danger of relegation. The reason we are in danger is because of a) a lack of funds to strengthen in key areas because of poor permanent signings/expensive loan gambles in previous years that didnt pay off & b) a lack of faith from the previous manager in the style of play he initially advocated (and which had garnered results Jan-July) instead regressing to a no risk, defensive & confusing 'style'.

Knight, Bird, Buchanan & Sibley have been the shining lights of this club over the past year with only Kazim & Bielik matching their impact on the first team. The aforementioned 4 would cost at least 25m to buy in a normal market..that in itself pays for the Academy. When you also factor in the sales of Liam Delap (1m plus), Thomas (1m) & yes, Bogle and Lowe over the past year or so, its clear this is a massive asset for the club to have.

 

That's the fallacy though. It might cost £25m to buy those players - although I suspect that £15m is closer to the mark, but we wouldn't need to buy youngsters with premium for future development. To buy one first choice and three squad players would give you change from £5m.

The academy has not paid for itself, even with the comparatively large recent output. What it does is make our cost base incredibly high.

[LeedsCityRam]

1 hour ago, CornwallRam said:

That's the fallacy though. It might cost £25m to buy those players - although I suspect that £15m is closer to the mark, but we wouldn't need to buy youngsters with premium for future development. To buy one first choice and three squad players would give you change from £5m.

The academy has not paid for itself, even with the comparatively large recent output. What it does is make our cost base incredibly high.

I think those 4 are a bit better than 'one first choice & 3 squad players' - Buchanan is first choice (Forsyth coming in for selective games), Bird was first choice for a few months (and will be once Shinnie's form drops off) & Sibley has also had a stretch of first team starts.

£5m is an incredibly conservative estimate for 4 players who could be expected to all start first team matches & you're also not factoring in the clear benefit from a FFP point of view of having players come into the squad with 100% saleable value. Your theory also places massive reliance on our scouting network to pick up cheap bargains & all the risk that comes with bringing unknown players to the club - most of whom would presumably have to come from abroad to fit that cost model (something which you've pointed out elsewhere is restricted by the changed relationship with the EU)

As to whether the Academy has paid for itself - we also have the Hendrick & Hughes sales to factor in (£11m and £8m including addons respectively) - add that to the circa £12m received from Sheffield Utd for Bogle & Lowe plus £2m for Delap and Thomas gets us to £33m which is nigh on 7 years worth of Academy running costs (assuming your £5m a year is correct - think that's quite a top end estimate myself) There are also the unrealised sales of Knight, Sibley, Gordon et al to further mitigate that - I think it has pretty clearly paid for itself.

[ziggyram59]

4 hours ago, Tamworthram said:

I agree, things could have been so different. However, I've just finished reading a book that contains all the board meeting minutes from this era and, whilst I don't doubt it is somewhat biased in favour of the board, it would seem to suggest Clough was by far from blameless.

Criticizing the fan, making decisions behind the boards back, signing players against medical advice (although he was vindicated in his decision), bringing the club into distribute with his outspoken comments about the FA, seriously flirting with other jobs (a la McLaren) and taking on TV commitments that interfered with his managerial duties.

That was just Clough's personality, it was Longson who pushed him to go on TV at the start of his time at Derby, Forest knew how to deal with Clough and they were far more successful there than with us. Derby boards of directors always been political and never straight forward. 

[desirelines]

Mel took over a club on the verge of promotion to the Premier League and leaves us a club on the verge of relegation into League One. Case closed. 

[Asanovic70]

 

Agree that Mel probably could be cited as 'best'/'worst' owner.

He arrived with the best of intentions, but has put the club’s immediate future under severe threat.

Adam Pearson was more a chief exec, brought in to preside over the sale like Trevor Birch (whilst at Swansea). There are some good football administrators out there whose first job is not to cause chaos but to oversee things & bring some stability back.

The League of Gentlemen chased glory too quickly. We didn't complain, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. We picked an ambitious manager, waving money at him. It may have been an opportunity just to take stock and build something over time. Ironically, this is the situation that occurred after the 11pts debacle.

GSE were out of their depth from the start (finances), Nigel Clough shielded them from a lot of scrutiny & bought them time. That said, severe budget constraints meant necessity was the mother of invention & forced us into good practices, buying shrewdly, avoiding mercenary purchases and developing our own players - a long boring, protracted process that many grew impatient with. GSE left the club relatively solvent.

As for Mel, I think his ego, love of gimmicks & PR got in the way, though I feel his genuine intention was to please the fans. The longer his tenure has gone on, the less he seemed to possess a strategy. He was a businessman who seemed to strike success with one investment (Candy Crush). Perhaps he has invested heavily in other business ventures that have not worked/been as successful, including us. In Mel's favour, his ownership has turned into an even bigger nightmare, for him, too, as it ultimately did for Lionel Pickering. He bought for us for the right reasons, but has now become saddled with an investment that he can no longer afford to run. There is a note of tragedy to proceedings. It is not as if he bled the club dry, which is why posters began to flag up previous owners like Jeremy Keith & that dreadful ABC loan. I am not conversant with finance, but that has echoes of Chappell, Sir Philip Green and the collapse of BHS. 

The League of Gentlemen & GSE were hampered by a lack of resources, whereas Mel possessed resources but they have been wasted on a raft of underachieving, overpaid signings (wage bill of £30m+ a year) that cost millions & yielded big losses. Mel developed the club's sources of income, matchday revenue (£1m a game), but obviously the Covid 19 pandemic was another factor to affect his ownership, as the money which helped to supplement his running of the club was no longer available.

In fact, I think Mostyn06 has ignored one other personage who I think turned out to be a highly damaging individual: Sam Rush. Mel ought not to receive all the blame, our former CEO may have brought in McClaren but he changed the way, the direction, the club was run alongside Mel. He took a gamble that very nearly worked, but chose to move away from the blue-print taken under Clough, the slow build & development of home-grown players. Very few youngsters emerged after the first Play-Off defeat (2014) until Bogle & Lowe, & the raft of youngsters blooded under Cocu. If you are going to rip something up, then you ought to replace it with a strategy. Rush, instead, alongside Mel, saw our wage bill increase and his Strike Rate with regards to signings was disappointing.

I see Sam Rush as much more culpable than Adam Pearson.

So, Mel is the best/worst, in terms of the poll, but its focus is too narrow as it does not take into account those owners who actually took money out of the club, i.e. Maxwell, the sale of Wright & Saunders, alongside Jeremy Keith, who was eventually convicted.

 

 

 

[NottsRam77]

I haven’t got the headspace for this lol

we’re in the bottom 3 .... let’s deal with that first 

[Asanovic70]

@LeedsCityRam Completely agree with you, Academies are vital, they are supposed to save money on transfer fees as well as generating incoming fees (paying for itself, in theory), a win-win situation.

@CornwallRam Running an Academy isn't cheap, but think about all the money wasted on Anya, the transfer fee & wages at £27k a week. It would have probably covered the running costs for 4-5 seasons. Mel Morris wasn't the first owner to harbour such ambitions, Lionel Pickering, too, had hopes to make the club more self-sufficient.

[strawhillram]

I was a huge fan of Mel but I think he’s lost the plot. Now he’s selling out 

[BIllyD]

2 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

I think those 4 are a bit better than 'one first choice & 3 squad players' - Buchanan is first choice (Forsyth coming in for selective games), Bird was first choice for a few months (and will be once Shinnie's form drops off) & Sibley has also had a stretch of first team starts.

£5m is an incredibly conservative estimate for 4 players who could be expected to all start first team matches & you're also not factoring in the clear benefit from a FFP point of view of having players come into the squad with 100% saleable value. Your theory also places massive reliance on our scouting network to pick up cheap bargains & all the risk that comes with bringing unknown players to the club - most of whom would presumably have to come from abroad to fit that cost model (something which you've pointed out elsewhere is restricted by the changed relationship with the EU)

As to whether the Academy has paid for itself - we also have the Hendrick & Hughes sales to factor in (£11m and £8m including addons respectively) - add that to the circa £12m received from Sheffield Utd for Bogle & Lowe plus £2m for Delap and Thomas gets us to £33m which is nigh on 7 years worth of Academy running costs (assuming your £5m a year is correct - think that's quite a top end estimate myself) There are also the unrealised sales of Knight, Sibley, Gordon et al to further mitigate that - I think it has pretty clearly paid for itself.

Hendrick and Hughes were products of the youth set up before we started to plough all this money in. Both were in the team before Mel took over.

Id also say that we have very little evidence of players being sold for over 5m, Hughes arguably our greater product, only went for just over this amount. 

[oldtimeram]

25 minutes ago, StrawHillRam said:

I was a huge fan of Mel but I think he’s lost the plot. Now he’s selling out 

Rats flee sinking ships

[CornwallRam]

2 hours ago, LeedsCityRam said:

I think those 4 are a bit better than 'one first choice & 3 squad players' - Buchanan is first choice (Forsyth coming in for selective games), Bird was first choice for a few months (and will be once Shinnie's form drops off) & Sibley has also had a stretch of first team starts.

£5m is an incredibly conservative estimate for 4 players who could be expected to all start first team matches & you're also not factoring in the clear benefit from a FFP point of view of having players come into the squad with 100% saleable value. Your theory also places massive reliance on our scouting network to pick up cheap bargains & all the risk that comes with bringing unknown players to the club - most of whom would presumably have to come from abroad to fit that cost model (something which you've pointed out elsewhere is restricted by the changed relationship with the EU)

As to whether the Academy has paid for itself - we also have the Hendrick & Hughes sales to factor in (£11m and £8m including addons respectively) - add that to the circa £12m received from Sheffield Utd for Bogle & Lowe plus £2m for Delap and Thomas gets us to £33m which is nigh on 7 years worth of Academy running costs (assuming your £5m a year is correct - think that's quite a top end estimate myself) There are also the unrealised sales of Knight, Sibley, Gordon et al to further mitigate that - I think it has pretty clearly paid for itself.

Your last point actually supports my argument. My issue isn't that we've got an academy, it's that we've got an all singing, all dancing cat 1 academy with bells and whistles. I would be amazed if it cost any less than £5m per season. Indeed, I suspect when the academy company accounts come out it might 'cost' quite a bit more, with anything that the academy touches being put through its books, even if that facility is mainly used by the first team. It makes sense to put every possible expense in a place where it is FFP exempt. But I suspect that £5m will be about right for the genuine academy spend.

And that's the problem. It's so expensive that it forces decisions on the first team manager. It's the tail wagging the dog. Back in the Hughes/Hendrick days, the academy was a valuable resource for the first team manager. When it produced players who were ready, they moved up naturally. These days that progression is forced. We've now got half a squad of academy graduates, a huge issue with FFP and we're in danger of getting relegated. I'm struggling to see how that is a success.

Rather than being a Premier League club in all but name, we need to be a club surviving on Championship income. We absolutely cannot afford a huge academy without committed sugar Daddy. Even then it's dangerous because such commitment often fades.

[strawhillram]

1 minute ago, oldtimeram said:

Rats flee sinking ships

I think he might have left it too late. Hope he can swim

[CornwallRam]

31 minutes ago, Asanovic70 said:

@LeedsCityRam Completely agree with you, Academies are vital, they are supposed to save money on transfer fees as well as generating incoming fees (paying for itself, in theory), a win-win situation.

@CornwallRam Running an Academy isn't cheap, but think about all the money wasted on Anya, the transfer fee & wages at £27k a week. It would have probably covered the running costs for 4-5 seasons. Mel Morris wasn't the first owner to harbour such ambitions, Lionel Pickering, too, had hopes to make the club more self-sufficient.

Transfers are always tricky - some work, some don't. It was ever thus. That's why clubs can't afford huge vanity projects in the Championship. They need all the resources to be available for the first team.

[LeedsCityRam]

33 minutes ago, CornwallRam said:

And that's the problem. It's so expensive that it forces decisions on the first team manager. It's the tail wagging the dog. Back in the Hughes/Hendrick days, the academy was a valuable resource for the first team manager. When it produced players who were ready, they moved up naturally. These days that progression is forced. We've now got half a squad of academy graduates, a huge issue with FFP and we're in danger of getting relegated. I'm struggling to see how that is a success.

Which Academy graduates do you feel have been forced on the team & arent up to scratch?

I suspect the progression of so many graudates under Cocu was more to do with his stated passion for bringing kids through (as he demonstrated at PSV) rather than financial constraints.

Think we'll have to agree to disagree on the causes of our current malaise. We've bought very erratically in the main over the past 5 years exacerbated by the constant change in style favoured by managers...those mistakes have cost far more than the Academy has. There are previous few first team signings that have increased in value under Morris' tenure.

[CornwallRam]

4 minutes ago, LeedsCityRam said:

Which Academy graduates do you feel have been forced on the team & arent up to scratch?

I suspect the progression of so many graudates under Cocu was more to do with his stated passion for bringing kids through (as he demonstrated at PSV) rather than financial constraints.

Think we'll have to agree to disagree on the causes of our current malaise. We've bought very erratically in the main over the past 5 years exacerbated by the constant change in style favoured by managers...those mistakes have cost far more than the Academy has. There are previous few first team signings that have increased in value under Morris' tenure.

For a club attempting to get promotion, which is the only route to sustainability, the only one who should be near the first 11 is Knight. Buchannan and Bird should be on the bench and Sibley coming in for cup games. 

Mel has stated that he wanted his managers to play young players. He's also shied away from signing experienced players so as not to block the route to the first team. That is such muddled thinking. The only way players block other players from the first team is if the manager believes that they are better. So by definition, Mel has a policy of favouring inferior players.  If it was possible to be sustainable in this division, it would be almost understandable, but deliberately reducing the quality of the first team decreases the chances of promotion and thus makes the club less sustainable. Add to that that the academy costs a fortune, it is a very questionable policy. 

[ram1964]

Maxwell

[Ted McMinn Football Genius]

4 minutes ago, ram1964 said:

Maxwell

100%

[Tyler Durden]

Can't someone change the title of this thread please every time I click on it and read the worsest owner it makes my skin crawl. 

[europia]

4 hours ago, StrawHillRam said:

I was a huge fan of Mel but I think he’s lost the plot. Now he’s selling out 

He's looking to conserve his wealth. Obviously owning a money haemorrhaging football club doesn't really fit in with that strategy. 

[Mostyn6]

57 minutes ago, Tyler Durden said:

Can't someone change the title of this thread please every time I click on it and read the worsest owner it makes my skin crawl. 

It wasnt the original title.