Derby County's Summer Takeover Collapse and Promotion Ambitions
Derby County were less than an hour away from changing hands this summer. Instead, the club’s owner doubled down on a promotion push.
Rams chief executive Stephen Pearce has revealed that David Clowes, the Derbyshire property developer who rescued the club from administration in 2022, came to the brink of selling to Saudi government official Turki Al-Sheikh in August – only for the deal to collapse at the last moment.
The agreement had been signed off. The Independent Football Regulator and the English Football League had both sanctioned the takeover. Derby were effectively in limbo while the bid was scrutinised, stuck in what Pearce called a “holding pattern” through a crucial stretch of the summer transfer window.
Then it vanished.
“The wind was taken out of our sails, totally,” Pearce told BBC Radio Derby, describing how Al-Sheikh suddenly pulled out. “We weren’t expecting it to fall down, effectively, an hour before we thought it was going to complete.”
The shock was real. So was the response.
“We regrouped and everybody got back on the horse,” Pearce said. “It was like, right, how do we go again? And let’s crack on with what we wanted to do.”
Clowes spends big while expecting to sell
What makes the story more striking is that Clowes had already bankrolled a major summer outlay while fully expecting to walk away from the club.
The owner had signed off a budget and approved deals as the takeover talks with Al-Sheikh rumbled on. The £6m move to bring Bobby Clark in permanently from RB Salzburg, the loan-to-buy agreement for Sam Szmodics from Ipswich worth £2.7m, and the roughly £600,000 paid to West Bromwich Albion for Alex Mowatt were all funded by Clowes at a time when he believed he was about to sell Derby County.
“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 [in] such a strong position.”
Clowes has never hidden his wish to bring in fresh investment to fuel a return to the Premier League. The proposed deal with Al-Sheikh – a powerful figure in Saudi government circles and a heavyweight in the boxing world – looked like the moment Derby would hitch their ambitions to serious global money after narrowly missing out on the Championship play-offs last season.
Instead, when the takeover crumbled, Clowes pulled the club off the market and turned his attention inwards.
Promotion push stays on track
The reaction was not to retreat, but to spend again.
The biggest single outlay after the failed deal was the £4m fee to sign David Ozoh from Crystal Palace. That move sat alongside a raft of free transfers and loans, including a deadline-day reunion with Eiran Cashin, as Derby rebuilt their squad with Clowes still writing the cheques.
Asked directly whether the disrupted summer and aborted takeover had stalled Derby’s Premier League ambitions, Pearce did not hesitate.
“Not in the slightest, otherwise we wouldn’t have spent all the money we’ve spent,” he said. “We want to push on. We want progression this season.”
Derby came within one administrative signature of a new era under foreign ownership. Instead, they head into the campaign with the same local owner who saved them, still spending, still chasing the same prize.
The question now is simple: with the club off the market and the squad heavily backed, can this be the season the Rams finally charge all the way back to the top flight?
