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Derby County 2017/18: Say You’ll Be There
Making sense of Derby County’s 2018 accounts is a challenging task as the club’s structure has been changed nearly as often as the line-up of the Sugababes. Enigmatic is the politest word that could be used to describe way that a myriad of different companies that are now running different elements of Derby which was further complicated by a new holding company Gelaw NewCo 203, taking over on 28 June 2018. Legally such a structure is perfectly valid and is common in other industries, whereas previously all of the club’s activities went through Derby County Football Club Limited the new set up arose after Mel Morris CBE took control of…
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QPR FFP Fine: Everything Counts in Large Amounts
Imagine someone stealing £170 million from you, and the culprit eventually is fined a tenth of that sum having spent all the money elsewhere. That’s how Derby County and their fans are feeling following the EFL Financial Fair Play verdict against QPR. On 24 May 2014, in the 90th minute of the Championship play off final against Derby County, (Sir) Bobby Zamora scored the only goal of the game to achieve promotion for Queens Park Rangers. Had QPR complied with FFP properly, it is highly unlikely that Zamora would have been part of the QPR team, after the club was relegated the previous season from the Premier League, along with…
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Derby County: Respectable?
If we have one pet hate here at the Price of Football it’s clubs who announce their results on the club website via a press release, but don’t publish them. Such behaviour usually is accompanied by a greatest hits tour of many impressive increases in some key financial figures, but not all the information is disclosed. The local newspaper writes up the press release in good faith, and the fans swallow the narrative as dictated by the club. The club relies on everyone then losing interest in the finances (and rightly so, we don’t love our clubs because of their balance sheets after all) and later the accounts are sent…