Derby County are deep in financial trouble and desperately need a saviour. As they drown in debt and overheads, the club faces bankruptcy and extinction unless it can find a hero with deep pockets.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. Actually, you may have done – because in 1984, this proud old club, freshly relegated to the third tier in its centenary year only nine years after being English champions for the second time in four seasons, were begging for help from someone, anyone, to keep the lights on. The saviour they found was a game-changer for football – one who saw its symbiosis with the media, and was arguably the first truly high-profile superstar owner without any connection to a club or its location.
He was also a shape-shifter, master bluffer, a confidence man and a criminal – a pension robber who died in mysterious circumstances off the Canary Islands coast. His family name, assumed by him to cover up his roots, was forever blighted and continues to elicit horror to this very day.
This is the story of Robert Maxwell and Derby County Football Club.
THE MAN OF MANY FACES
“You wanna try Maxwell. He’s a bloody egotist. And he’s looking.”
So said Football League president Jack Dunnett to a terrified Stuart Webb in the summer of 1984. Derby’s debt stood at £1.5m; nowadays, barely enough for one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s socks, but a death sentence in the financially turbulent ’80s.
The Inland Revenue had filed a High Court winding-up petition, freezing the club’s bank account. With interest piling up – the base rate was around 9.5 per cent compared with today’s 0.5 per cent – NatWest effectively owned the famous old Baseball Ground.
Facing extinction, desperate Derby had turned to Webb. He’d been club secretary during their ’70s glory years, before setting up Lonsdale Travel: corporate transportation providers whose clients included England and Liverpool.
Like most boards at the time, Derby’s was largely made up of local businessmen – butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who’d bought in, but weren’t always very financially savvy. Having bought a majority of shares
