Derby County Owner David Clowes Doubles Down on Premier League Push

Derby County owner David Clowes came within an hour of walking away from the club – yet is now doubling down on his push for the Premier League.

That is the picture painted by chief executive Stephen Pearce, who revealed how close the Rams came to changing hands in August, and how quickly the mood inside Pride Park had to flip.

A sale agreed… then gone in an hour

Clowes, the Derbyshire property developer and lifelong supporter who dragged Derby out of administration in the summer of 2022, had agreed to sell the Championship club to Saudi government official Turki Al-Sheikh.

The deal had cleared the key hurdles. Both the Independent Football Regulator and the English Football League had signed it off. Inside the club, staff were preparing for a new era.

Then it vanished.

Al-Sheikh suddenly withdrew, leaving Derby stunned and stranded in what Pearce called a “holding pattern” for weeks during the crucial early stages of the summer transfer window.

“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.”

For a large chunk of the window, Derby waited while the bid was pored over. Plans paused. Decisions delayed. The club’s future direction hung on lawyers’ wording and regulatory sign-offs.

And then, with the finish line in sight, the buyer walked away.

Clowes spends big while expecting to sell

What happened next underlines why Clowes has earned such fierce backing inside the club.

Even as the takeover process rolled on, he had already signed off a sizeable budget and green-lit key deals. He did it believing he would never see that money again.

The numbers are stark.

• Around £6m went on making Bobby Clark’s move from RB Salzburg permanent.
• A loan-to-buy deal worth £2.7m brought in Sam Szmodics from Ipswich.
• Roughly £600,000 secured Alex Mowatt from West Bromwich Albion.

Every penny of that outlay came from Clowes while he thought he was about to hand the club over.

“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.”

Clowes could easily have slammed the brakes on.

“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’,” Pearce added.

“And he didn't. He backed it regardless and that's why we're such a strong position.”

Off the market and all-in on promotion

Clowes has never hidden his desire to bring in new investors to fuel a serious tilt at the Premier League. The agreement with Al-Sheikh – a powerful figure in boxing as well as a senior Saudi official – was seen as a potential game-changer for a club that finished just outside the play-off places last season.

When that collapsed, the strategy flipped.

Clowes pulled Derby County off the market and turned his attention back to building the squad he had nearly handed over.

The biggest single spend after the failed takeover was the £4m move for David Ozoh from Crystal Palace. That deal sat alongside a string of free transfers and loans, including a deadline-day reunion with Eiran Cashin.

The message from the boardroom is clear: the promotion plan has not been shelved.

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.”

An owner who thought he was selling kept signing cheques. A sale that was an hour away never happened. Now the man who saved Derby from administration is back at the wheel, paying the bills and aiming up.

The next few months will show whether that gamble is enough to drag the Rams back into the top flight.