Tears flowed for Clowes after takeover was done
THERE were tears of joy for David Clowes after he completed his takeover of Derby County.
He has been telling RamsTV about the process which led to him saving the club.
The lifelong Rams fan completed the deal on July 1 and told the club’s media: “I just went through every single emotion possible.
“I was down in London on the day we completed, I have work commitments down there.
“We should have completed it on the Thursday but it went to the Friday and I remember being in a restaurant with my wife, I got the email to confirm it was happening.
“When we got back on the tube to St Pancras to get the train back to Derby, I got the text saying ‘completed’ at 5.26pm.
“Tears were rolling down on the tube and for Kath, my wife.
“Everybody was in the tube, it was rush hour and everybody was thinking, what’s going on with these guys.
“Incredible feeling, absolutely incredible, I just can’t put it into words.”
But taking over the club was not all plain sailing, the completion being held up by the “multitude of documents” that needed to be dealt with.
“This particular one was probably one of the most complicated acquisitions we’ve ever seen but there were a lot of twists and turns through this process,” he said.
“But the way we look at it, we look at solutions and I believe we found a lot of the answers to the issues.
“That’s why we managed to do the deal.
“The team have been working on this and they have been absolutely superb on this, I can’t speak highly of those guys because without that, we wouldn’t be able to get this deal.”
Clowes also recalled being “very concerned” about why the club sale wasn’t going through and why he took the decision to explore a potential deal.
“I go back to February 2022, I was very concerned, I was on the outside looking in and thinking why’s the club not selling, is there a blockage in the system? I made one or two calls and I did say that if there was any interest and that interest fell away then I would be interested at looking at the club as a last resort, really,” he said.
“That was based on Chris Kirchner, he wanted to do the club only, he didn’t want to do the stadium at that stage. So we got approached and were asked if we would be interested in purchasing the stadium? So I thought why not, it’s a property deal, it’s what we do.
“So we agreed the deal and that was obviously based on Chris purchasing the club.
“Chris obviously pulled out, so I thought, we may have a stadium but not a football club.
“That’s when I thought we seriously need to look at this as a company.”