Derby County: Takeover collapse took wind out of sails, says Stephen Pearce

Owner David Clowes remains committed to bankrolling Derby County's Premier League promotion ambitions despite having been an hour away from selling the club, says Rams chief executive Stephen Pearce.

Clowes, a Derbyshire property developer and lifelong Rams fan who took the club out of administration in the summer of 2022, was poised to hand over ownership of the Championship side to Saudi Arabia government official Turki Al-Sheikh in August.

Despite an agreement being reached, and the deal being sanctioned by both the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) and the English Football League (EFL), Al-Sheikh suddenly withdrew his interest.

Pearce said the weeks it took for the bid to be scrutinised left Derby in a "holding pattern" for a large part of the summer transfer window and added that the collapse of the deal was "completely out of the blue".

"The wind was taken out of our sails, totally," Pearce told BBC Radio Derby.

"We weren't expecting it to fall down, effectively, an hour before we thought it was going to complete.

"But 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."

Derby and Clowes were well positioned to do exactly that, with the Rams owner having already signed off on a budget and committed to signings while the takeover attempt was unfolding.

The £6m it took to bring Bobby Clark in on a permanent deal from RB Salzburg, the loan to buy agreement to get Sam Szmodics for £2.7m from Ipswich, and the sum of around £600,000 it took to get Alex Mowatt from West Bromwich Albion were all funded by Clowes when he thought he was about to sell the club.

"This is why he's such an incredible owner. 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," Pearce said.

"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 had long been open about his desire to bring in new investors to help fund the club's push to return to the Premier League, and the agreement with Al-Sheikh – who, alongside being a Saudi government official, is a hugely influential figure in the world of boxing - had been seen as a significant boost for a side that finished just outside the play-off places last season.

When the takeover failed, Clowes took Derby County off the market and focused efforts on strengthening the club he nearly offloaded.

The £4m spent on getting David Ozoh from Crystal Palace was the biggest outlay - alongside a list of free transfers and loans, which included a deadline day reunion with Eiran Cashin - after the aborted deal.

Asked if the disrupted summer had "stalled" the club's aims of Premier League promotion, Pearce replied: "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."

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