Derby County's Bold Gamble After Failed Takeover
Derby County were less than an hour from changing hands. Instead, they doubled down on a promotion gamble funded by the man who nearly walked away.
Owner David Clowes, the Derbyshire property developer who rescued the club from administration in 2022, had agreed to sell to Saudi government official Turki Al-Sheikh in August. The deal had gone through every hoop – cleared by the new Independent Football Regulator and signed off by the EFL. All that was left was completion.
Then Al-Sheikh pulled out.
No warning. No softening of the blow. Just gone.
“The wind was taken out of our sails, totally,” chief executive Stephen Pearce told BBC Radio Derby, recalling the moment Derby’s summer was turned upside down. “We weren't expecting it to fall down, effectively, an hour before we thought it was going to complete.”
For weeks, Derby had been stuck in what Pearce called a “holding pattern” during the scrutiny process. The club moved cautiously through a large chunk of the transfer window, waiting for the takeover to land. When it collapsed, the plan could easily have gone with it.
It didn’t.
Pearce described how the club simply reset. “We regrouped and everybody got back on the horse. It was like, right how do we go again? And let's crack on with what we wanted to do."
The striking part is this: Clowes had already been spending as if he would never see his money again.
While the Al-Sheikh deal edged towards completion, the Derby owner had signed off a Championship-level budget and green-lit significant business. The £6m fee to bring Bobby Clark in permanently from RB Salzburg, the £2.7m loan-to-buy move for Sam Szmodics from Ipswich, and around £600,000 to prise Alex Mowatt from West Bromwich Albion were all paid out when Clowes believed he was on the verge of selling.
All of it funded by an owner who expected to hand over the keys and walk away with nothing back on those deals.
“This is why he's such an incredible owner,” Pearce said. “He thought the takeover was going to happen, he knew he was never going to get a penny back for all of that money he spent on those players and he still did it.
“He could have quite easily, on 1 July, said to us and said to John [head coach John Eustace], 'look, I think this is going through, the signs are the club is going to be sold, you're just going to have to wait because every penny I put in into transfers now I'm not going to get back'.
“And he didn't. He backed it regardless and that's why we're such a strong position."
Clowes has never hidden his wish to bring in extra investment to fuel a serious tilt at the Premier League. Partnering with Al-Sheikh – a powerful figure in Saudi government circles and a major player in world boxing – looked like a statement of intent for a club that finished just outside the play-offs last season.
Instead, when the deal collapsed, Clowes pulled Derby off the market altogether. No more for-sale signs. No more limbo. The focus swung fully back to strengthening the squad he nearly passed on.
The spending didn’t stop with Clark, Szmodics and Mowatt. After the aborted takeover, Derby paid £4m to sign David Ozoh from Crystal Palace, the biggest single fee of the window. Around that, the club stacked the squad with free transfers and loans, including a deadline-day reunion with Eiran Cashin.
For a club that had just seen a lucrative takeover vanish, it was an aggressive stance.
Asked whether the disrupted summer had stalled Derby’s Premier League ambitions, Pearce was blunt. “Not in the slightest, otherwise we wouldn't have spent all the money we've spent.
“We want to push on. We want progression this season.”
The sale that never was has left Derby with something different: a locally rooted owner still bankrolling a promotion charge, having already shown he was prepared to spend big even as the exit door stood open.
Now there is no takeover to wait on. Just the hard question that will define their season – has all this backing built a squad capable of finally dragging Derby County back to the Premier League?
