“When I walk down the tunnel on a Saturday and I see 30,000 people there, it makes me laugh that we’re managing this club,” says Derby County manager Paul Warne.
“Me and my staff joke when we leave the training ground on a Saturday morning and drive down to the stadium. ‘What are they doing letting us manage here?’. But I thought the same at the New York with Rotherham. The fact we know we’re fortunate inspires us not to take shortcuts and make the best of everything we can.”
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Derby County are on a roll under Warne. They are 19 games unbeaten in all competitions in 90 minutes (they lost to Liverpool on penalties in the Carabao Cup) and have a tasty FA Cup fourth-round match against Premier League West Ham United to look forward to in a few days’ time.
Staff have smiles on their faces, fans sing about scaling the Football League once more and challenging for promotion, and their hope is not misplaced — a dramatic 2-1 win at Port Vale on Tuesday night, with both goals coming in the final three minutes, keeps the League One promotion dream alive with 19 games left to play.
The bedlam of the away end and the club in general sets a scene that is a stark contrast to where Derby found themselves a year ago, but not just because 3,821 travelling fans have turned out for another league game in their first third-tier season since 1985-86. After going into administration in September 2021 and an 11-month battle to save the club, new owner David Clowes secured a late deal in July 2022 to ensure Derby had a future.
The deal happened quickly and the local businessman, who is the owner of property investment firm Clowes Developments, has gone from season ticket holder to its modest saviour, keen to stay out of the limelight and let the football do the talking. He is a character quite unlike the would-be owners Chris Kirchner and Erik Alonso, who got some way through the takeover process in a very public manner.
Sympathy for former owner Mel Morris is in short supply. As the face of their past spending as they chased the Premier League, only to be scuppered in four play-off defeats in the 14 seasons since they were relegated from the Premier League, he represents a period in the club’s history that Derby’s rivals will say was self-inflicted.
Most fans would acknowledge that, but there is a sincere hope, at least inside the club, that after the battle for survival, there is a commitment to doing things differently.
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“This isn’t the Derby County from three years ago that was spending phenomenal amounts of money which nearly put the club under,” Warne tells The Athletic after a frosty morning’s training at their impressive Moor Farm facility.
“We’re trying to make the club healthier. Not self-sustainable because I don’t know if it will ever be that, but just healthier. We’re not here to be the bank managers and reduce everything — we’re improving the tunnel area at the stadium and you’ll see things we’ve put around the training ground to put a bit of colour and identity down.”
Gooooooooood morning! 😍😍
The celebrations. 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲.#dcfcfans pic.twitter.com/ZNhUBM0qtL
— Derby County (@dcfcofficial) January 25, 2023
Changes in the past eight months have been more than just cosmetic, but the subtle tweaks made by Warne, including the installation of a ‘win wall’ and a ‘clean sheet wall’ of framed photos from the season at the training ground, speak to a focus on the present.
A photo from their stubborn, battling win against Port Vale will be the next frame to go on the wall, which has filled up so fast across their unbeaten run that staff have struggled to keep pace with printing, framing and hanging them all.
At Pride Park, Warne has had more photos of the team put up in the tunnel and changing rooms to make players “feel valued and inspired”, which has worked effectively on a squad that had to be hastily assembled following the takeover.
“I came in for a few days to train initially and then as soon as the takeover had gone through we could get the paperwork sorted,” says goalkeeper Joe Wildsmith, who joined from Sheffield Wednesday in July 2022 and has been one of Derby’s standout players.
“A lot of people are taking pride in the clean sheet wall now, even some of the attacking players. There’s a real team mentality of knowing that if we get a clean sheet we’re definitely not going to lose, so it’s good to see new faces getting on the wall because we’ve got players out of position like Korey Smith and Louie Sibley playing at full-back.”
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With just five senior players on the books on day one, the summer brought the arrival of recent Championship players Conor Hourihane, David McGoldrick and Tom Barkhuizen, among 15 other signings who started the campaign under Liam Rosenior.
Under an agreement signed with the EFL as part of their exit from administration, Derby are on a business plan that limits their ability to spend on transfer fees and wages, which has had some bearing on their summer and January transfer window activity. And while not all of the new summer arrivals were proven, they have largely, like the club as a whole, thrived under Warne’s compassionate and enthusiastic style of management.
“I feel… not that I overstayed my welcome at Sheffield Wednesday, but it was time to go and it was time for me to experience something different and take myself out of that comfort zone,” says Wildsmith. “I’d been there since the age of 12, I knew every room, every corridor at the training ground, all the staff members. The biggest thing here, with the manager, is his enthusiasm rubs off on people. When he talks and when he’s explaining things or has things he wants you to do, it’s a lot easier to take on board when he’s got that bubbly character.
“It’s contagious, he’s always laughing and having a joke but on a serious side, it becomes really ingrained in you in terms of what he wants. He wants us to enjoy ourselves and play attacking football, win every game and that mentality pleases people. There’s no mixed message, we’re going to win the game.”
It is not just the new faces that are impressed with Warne. “He’s very positive and gives you confidence through everything he does, he gives you that belief and his big strength is motivating, getting people onside and getting everybody pulling in the right direction,” says defender Craig Forsyth, now in his 10th year at Pride Park.
“He buys every player a mug with a picture of them when they score their first goal for him, but I’ve not got one and I don’t know if I will! He’s very good with personal relationships. He’ll message you or pull you to one side for a chat and he’ll understand if there’s something going on off the field and you need time away. Once you’re out on the training pitch he demands that you give absolutely everything.”
Warne’s personal touch extends beyond the players — staff at the training ground have found him to be a down-to-earth and approachable leader. He regularly checks in with staff one-to-one to ask about their well-being, encouraging them to join his morning workouts in some cases to aid their mental and physical health.
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Leaving Rotherham, where he won three promotions from League One, was not straightforward for the 49-year-old, who faced early doubters after a tricky first few weeks at Derby.
“I had my cousin say to me, ‘You won’t do it’,” Warne says. “So I asked why and he said it’s because you’re from Norfolk and Norfolk people don’t take gambles, so when I took the job, one of the first things I did was text him. It just felt like it had come to a natural end at Rotherham and that’s the truth. And this is some club to be asked to manage, it was flattering. The owner explained where the club was and the reason he wanted me to manage it as opposed to 100 better candidates than us.
“It felt like after being at Rotherham for 20 years in total I wanted to leave out the front door. And you’ll probably get a hundred fans reading this and tweet you to tell you I’m an arsehole but I wanted to leave the club healthy with good assets, a good team, we’ve not made enemies, the fans hadn’t turned on us. I could have stayed another two or three years or a matter of weeks and selfishly I didn’t want my kids to see things ever turn toxic on me. So it felt natural for us to leave and of the opportunities put in front of us this one seemed most idyllic for our personalities.”
The ‘we’ is a constant for Warne. His management team of Richie Barker, Matt Hamshaw and Andy Warrington carshare most days from their homes in south Yorkshire and he describes their style as “relationship leaders” who build trust over time rather than having an instant impact. It worked at Rotherham and, after picking up 36 points in 18 games, the early signs are positive at Derby.
Following in the footsteps of Wayne Rooney, Phillip Cocu and Frank Lampard, Warne was not a glamour appointment and arrived in difficult circumstances with support strong for interim manager Rosenior, who has since moved on to Hull City.
“I knew walking into a dressing room full of new people who have had better careers than I had they might have thought, ‘What are they going to tell us that we don’t know?’” he says. “So it’s about winning the group over. I’m not stupid enough to type my name into Twitter, but I reckon about 50 to 60 per cent of the fanbase didn’t want us because we weren’t sexy enough, which I find hard to believe with the way I can pull a bobble hat off.”
His bobble hat has since gained cult status at Pride Park, with each of the designs he has worn selling out in the club shop. Fans regularly ask to swap hats with Warne but he is not afraid to admit he is superstitious and “had the whole family looking for it and at the end, someone was holding it up like in Lion King” when he lost it during Derby’s unbeaten run.
After Tuesday night’s scrappy game at Vale Park, Warne rewarded his players with a few days off given their gruelling set of fixtures since Christmas. At 2-1 up with minutes left to play, the away end sang last season’s favourite — ‘We’re Derby County, we fight ’til the end’ — which became the anthem of their spirited fight against relegation under Rooney.
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“Rooney brought a sense of unity among the fanbase,” says Jay Mann of supporter group Punjabi Rams. “Paul’s built on that and we’re now back arguing and having differing opinions on style of play and players rather than whether we’ll have a club or not.
“That is so nice to talk about, to have those little annoyances and what helps even more is the personality and character of the manager. The way he comes across in interviews is very honest and straight-talking and that’s what fans admire. All fans ever want is transparency and honesty.”
“The message Wayne put out last season was that we were representing the staff out on the pitch, so it meant much more, it was for those people who had lost their jobs or who were facing uncertainty,” says defender Forsyth.
“My little girl goes to school here so you’d see people in the playground when picking the kids up from school and they wanted to speak about it. You have a massive bond with the club and the area. I’ve lived here for 10 years now, both my kids have been born here, so it does make it more enjoyable that we’re now on the other side and the club is looking upwards.”
Though Derby can put their “survive at all costs” mentality, in Forsyth’s words, from last season behind them, it has paid off in games as they look to reel in League One’s three breakaway teams: Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday and leaders Plymouth Argyle. Warne would “much rather be chased” than be the chasers but has ambitions of catching the top two, even though that was beyond the imagination of most fans.
“At the start of the season, if you asked me, I would have just said we would hope for consolidation, take a year out of the limelight just to rebuild, stay in League One and not fall further,” says Mann. “Now in the commanding position that we’re in, play-offs have to be the minimum. There’s no claim that we have a right to be back in the Championship just because we’re Derby. We all know that there was almost no Derby County, so it doesn’t really matter which league we’re in.”
“The big thing I’ve noticed is the fans are warm towards the players and the club in general in a different way to where I’ve been before because Derby County nearly didn’t exist,” says Wildsmith.
“And the biggest thing for them is that the club is here. If we can add to that by giving them promotion, then that would be the perfect end to a difficult chapter for the fans.”
(Top photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)