It is a cold Tuesday night at Old Trafford and Andy Appleby, the Derby County chairman, is glowing. His team are 3-0 down in the first half of the second leg of their Carling Cup semi-final against Manchester United. But, right now, it is not about the result.
Appleby is merely reflecting the glow emanating from the visiting supporters to his right, where 8,000 Derby fans are waving scarves and chanting: “We support! We support! We support our local team! We support our local team!” A smile spreads across his face. This is what it is about. This is why he is here. This is why it works.
“It” is the approach that Appleby and his company, General Sports Entertainment, have taken since gaining control of Derby less than a year ago. The deal — thought to have been worth about £60 million (including the acquisition of £31 million of debt) — barely registered on the national radar. At the time, Derby were bottom of the Barclays Premier League, on their way to setting a record for futility on the pitch. Appleby’s group resembled just another run-of-the-mill cadre of overseas owners, with a frighteningly generic and uninteresting company name to boot.
What is remarkable, though, is what they have achieved in such a short time. Their average attendance is in excess of 29,000 — the best in the Coca-Cola Championship and the twelfth highest in the country. They attracted nearly 4,000 new season ticket-holders, despite being relegated last season. And at a time when the economy is struggling, their sponsorship revenues have doubled.
You can throw in another date with United, as well. They meet on Sunday in the FA Cup fifth round.
All this with a team whose results have ranked somewhere between the mediocre and the downright awful. In fact, only recently did they manage to get out of the relegation zone.
Several things set General Sports Entertainment apart from some of the other American owners who have entered the Premier League. First, unlike the Glazer family at Old Trafford or Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr at Liverpool, they did not do it through debt. Appleby raised money by approaching a number of North American investors and sold them his business plan to fund the purchase.
“When we acquired the club, there were existing debts of £31 million, we’re now down to £24 million,” Tom Glick, the Derby chief executive, says. “Come September 1, it will be down to £15 million. And that will be entirely made up of the mortgage on Pride Park, which actually has very favourable terms.”
Second, they figured that, if they were going to buy into Derby, they had to put a lot of themselves into the club. Glick and Tim Hinchey, the commercial director, moved to Derbyshire, along with their families.“What’s been important to us is to blaze our own trail and do it our way,” Glick says. “It was important to show we were committed. Other foreign owners here have had mixed reviews, so when we took over we got a lot of questions. We gave an honest answer. This is our profession. This is what we do. We’re passionate about it.”
Note that “it” is a certain way of running a sports club. Glick does not pretend to have been a lifelong Derby fan (though he can rattle off key dates with the best of them). Rather, he is a man who believes in a certain blueprint for a football club. That is the third element that sets General Sports Entertainment apart from other overseas owners (and why the Derby supporters chant about supporting their “local team” resonates so much).
Hang out with Glick, Appleby and Hinchey and you will not hear them talking about the “all-important” Asian markets, foreign tours, overseas television rights, websites in Cantonese and Malay or of turning Derby into a “global brand”. Their plan for success is based on local ties.
“Maybe one day we will have a Chinese website, but what’s important now is getting things sorted locally and there will never be anything more important than what we do right here in Derby,” Glick says. “The very existence of our club revolves around selling out home matches and how supporters feel every time they step into their ground. They drive the engine of the whole thing.”
With little or no TV revenue, you need to fund yourself the old-fashioned way: bums on seats. When Glick arrived, he announced that Derby, who were on the verge of relegation, were going to sell out their last seven home matches. “The staff looked at us as if we had two heads,” he says. But they went out and did it. “There’s no secret formula, just great ideas and a lot of hard work,” he says. “But I think it showed the fans that we believed in what we were doing.”
One of those “great ideas” was group sales. With hindsight, it seems like an elementary concept, but nobody in English football was pursuing it as aggressively as Derby did. In fact, Hinchey, the commercial director, says that they have been deluged by calls from other clubs wanting to know how it works. “What we did was approach sports clubs, social clubs, scouts, churches, basically just about any type of group in the Derby area who wanted a ‘day out’ experience,” Hinchey says. “We give them a chance to buy tickets together at a small discount and we tailor the experience, so, for example, if it’s a school group, we may let them walk out on the pitch and wave to their parents in the stands. It’s not hard to do and it means a lot to the fans.”
Hinchey also came up with incentives for local sports leagues. Any league selling more than 2,500 tickets over the course of a season gets to play at Pride Park (a local Islamic boys’ league sold 3,500 and did just that). One Church of England group took 500 tickets as part of an incentive to get “bums in pews” offering a services-plus-football package.
“This all works hand in hand with what happens on the pitch,” Appleby says. “If we can create a little bit of extra revenue by working the way we work, we can put a little more into our squad. Maybe it’s an extra million or two pounds a season and that gets us a slightly better striker or midfielder. It really does make a difference.”
