Whether it’s at Derby or elsewhere, the second act of Mike Ashley as a football owner has a feeling of inevitability about it.
Ashley has been circling the situation at Pride Park for months and as D-day arrives at a club in desperate need of a resolution, the former Newcastle owner has let it be known that he offers an alternative to Chris Kirchner, whose exclusivity has been extended to Saturday.
Former owner Mel Morris still owns the club’s stadium and negotiations over either a lease or buying it outright are at a delicate stage. Derby just need a resolution and Ashley believes he can offer one. If there’s no resolution by the weekend, he might just get that chance.
If it isn’t at Derby in League One, it’ll be somewhere soon and it is an intriguing prospect for a businessman who emerged from his experience at Newcastle bruised but unbowed.
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That tallies with what allies of Ashley told i earlier this year when they said he was actively looking for a route back into the game. The EFL “makes sense” they said, giving him the opportunity to invest more modestly than in the Premier League – where he found with Newcastle he neither wanted to nor could afford to put money in.
Focus has been on Derby but there are plenty of other clubs in the EFL up for sale. And Ashley probably sits better as the owner of a club with recent financial issues where ambitions are more modest.
If he has learned his lessons from what became a toxic situation at Newcastle – where communication, infrastructure spend and not empowering the right people led to the club diminishing over his decade of stewardship – he could work at that level. He has had emails and correspondence from plenty of Derby fans who believe his model of self-sustainability is better than what Morris, who invested heavily before realising it couldn’t be sustained, offered.
The problem is Ashley was stubborn at St James’ Park, refusing to heed counsel and limiting the club’s ambition through his own mistakes. The contrast to the current regime at Newcastle, who have listened, explained and invested, has been especially stark.
His model could have worked at Newcastle if he had the right people in place. And that would be key at Derby or anywhere else he chooses to pitch up.
While the number of clubs actively on the market is small, those in the takeover game believe that informally nearly every owner in the Championship would be open to offers.
To name but two: Birmingham City are set for a buy out soon while Sheffield United are in talks with US businessman Henry Mauriss. If Derby falls through, takeover watchers expect Ashley to look again at the market. League One and even League Two offer potential sleeping giants.
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The EFL is certainly a tough place to own a club at the moment. Broadcasting revenue is a fraction of that in the Premier League and many clubs are still paying the price for largesse in the pre-Covid world in the form of inflated wage bills and players with years left on contracts they can no longer afford.
But that rocky terrain offers opportunity for someone like Ashley, who loves the idea of transforming a distressed brand.
“Mike is a solution maker, he goes into things like (Derby), it doesn’t frighten him,” Bishop said at the start of the year at the prospect of sorting out the mess at Derby.
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