Bill's Take: We Want Wanchope Not Another Teale! Friday, 15th May 2015 12:57 by Bill Riordan A few weeks ago in this column I pointed out the irony of this moment marking the fortieth anniversary of the Rams’ second and last League championship success. In contrast with our recent and more mundane hopes that the club might reach the Championship playoffs, I wondered how the club has fallen so far. Derby has gone from being one of the best club sides in Europe to second tier also-rans. Obviously one major reason is Brian Clough and Dave MacKay; despite some good managers since the glory days, the club has not had a manager close to their calibre in recent years. But what about the part played by money? The Rams are not one of the biggest clubs that enjoy enormous resources, but the support the club gets ought to put them well above eighth in the Championship. I had a suspicion that part of the club’s problem might lie not in how much money comes in to the club, but in how the money is spent; the reason why I have always advocated a policy of great wariness in the transfer market. So I decided to do a little basic research on how much success has been enjoyed by the club’s biggest signings of the last twenty years. I went back to July 1995, and picked out those signings that were the largest for the times when they were made; the cut-off ends up being £600,000. I then allocated to each a purely subjective score based on such things as number of appearances, impact on the team, subsequent fees received; that sort of thing. In an effort to achieve consistency, I did not rely on my memory to supply names and fees, but used the ‘Soccer Base’ web site; supplemented occasionally by Wikipedia. Here are the results:
I should note here that I was a big supporter of the George Thorne signing, and I remain hopeful that the move will be successful. But three League starts in return for a £3.2 million fee is a poor return so far, and must be scored as such. So what conclusions can we draw from the data and my scores? Clearly, big money signings for the Rams in the last twenty years have not worked in the long term; only Darryl Powell, Robbie Savage, John Brayford and Richard Keogh managed 100 League starts. It is also clear that — for me at least — most of these signings were not hugely influential. The only ones I awarded a score of eight or more were Powell again, Paulo Wanchope, Francesco Baiano, Seth Johnson, Brayford, Jason Shackell and Keogh. On the other hand, this group includes some of the club’s worst ever signings, such as Bjorn Otto Bragstad, Francois Grenet and Liam Dickinson. The 41 signings cost the club a total of almost £64 million; or an average of just over £1.5 million each. The average score for all of them is 4.9; so Conor Sammon’s score of 5 puts him just above average, and his fee of only £1.2 million makes him a comparative bargain. Why did so many fail? Just from memory, quite a number of them — Lee Morris and Branko Strupar would be examples - suffered from serious injuries after joining the Rams, which prevented them from playing more games. Some might have been an overreach for the level the Rams were playing: Morris again and Claude Davis. Others joined the club when things were not going well, and may have been desperation signings; such as Emmanuel Villa and Robbie Savage. Undoubtedly some were just not very good. Just looking at this table, it is beyond argument that the Rams have wasted a great deal of money on failed transfers in the last twenty years. It almost forces us to ask whether managers know as much about the game as we think they should. One thing is almost certain: if the club had spent this money more wisely, the team would be in a very different place today. So as the club looks forward to the 2015/2016 season and begins adding to the squad, we should all be careful of demanding that the Rams should make big money signings indiscriminately. We would all prefer another Paulo Wanchope to another Gary Teale.
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