Promised land now in sight for kings of mud heap
“It could have been Facebook ...we were three years ahead”
MEL MORRIS can remember when Derby County made a decent job of adapting to life in England’s top flight. It was September 1969 and Morris was a teenager attending a memorable first game at the Baseball Ground. Standing in a crowd of 41,826 (a record at the ground which was demolished in 2003), Morris watched in awe as Brian Clough’s newly-promoted side put five goals past a Tottenham team boasting superstars such as Jimmy Greaves and Alan Mullery.
‘Within 18 months I was a season-ticket holder,’ says Morris. And it was not too long after that, with the emergence of football hooliganism in the 1970s, that he was also being ‘run into the river at Stoke’.
‘It was fairly terrifying,’ recalls the 59-year-old. ‘I remember clambering up this massive bank, hoping they hadn’t been able to get round to confront us on the other side.’
Following Derby today is a rather more comfortable experience for Morris, and so it should be. This son of a builder from Littleover, who left school at 16 to work in the foundry of a lawnmower firm, now sits in the directors’ box of an ambitious Championship club he owns outright.
Ranked 262nd in the Sunday Times Rich List, Morris is perhaps best known for making a sizeable chunk of his £400million fortune from the sale of the Candy Crush Saga video game.
But he was a wealthy man long before then. He left the lawnmower business to work in the computer department of a pork pie company, and by his early 20s had his own company after proving something of a whiz at computer programming. ‘I still write programmes today,’ he says.
His business grew rapidly, and at one stage he moved to America where he did well out of the minicomputer boom near Boston. Back in Derby he would build a 99-room hotel, naming one of the suites after the football club founder William Morley.
His one regret? Perhaps failing to realise he could have beaten Mark Zuckerberg to his billions when he developed a dating website called uDate. ‘It could have been Facebook,’ says Morris. ‘It was the same application, and we were three or four years ahead. We just thought people were more interested in meeting people they didn’t know.’
The business still sold for £150m. Not exactly a disaster then. But Derby fans should pause to wonder what might have been had uDate been developed to connect existing friends. Derby could have been another Chelsea or Manchester City, only this time under local ownership.
Even so, their football club is in remarkably rude health going into today’s FA Cup tie against Hartlepool and they owe much to the man now showing me around a training ground he is about to spend £12m improving — reportedly taking his overall investment beyond the £100m mark.
His first serious involvement dates to 2006, when he was a member of a local consortium that rescued the club from financial ruin. Derby were £55m in debt, and had lost ownership of what is now called the iPro Stadium. But by the time Morris and his colleagues sold the club to American owners two years later, the stadium had been returned to the club and the debt reduced significantly. The investors made a relatively small six-figure profit.
Morris stood down from the board with the arrival of General Sports and Entertainment but two days before the play-off final in 2014 he was back, purchasing a 20 per cent stake in a deal that represented something of a gamble.
‘The club was valued at £100m if we got promoted and £50m if we didn’t, and we cut the deal down the middle,’ says Morris. ‘In the interests of getting the deal done quickly we both took a punt based on that game.’
In the end Derby lost to QPR and Morris knew he had just paid £5m over the odds. ‘I remember my wife asking me if I was OK,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘To be honest I was more disappointed we lost.’
It did not deter him from increasing his investment, and a year later he bought the rest of the club. ‘I could just sense, after buying that first stake, that there was a different level of ambition among the shareholders compared to how I felt about the club,’ he says.
‘My belief was we could get into the Premier League but needed some investment to sustain the position should we achieve that.
‘The club is a very interesting thing to be part of. One in 10 people in the city come to the games. But it’s not something you can approach with the same mindset as other businesses. I don’t think “Derby County can make me a fortune”. The fans at a football club don’t want to see shareholders taking, say, £25m out every season. They want a club to have ambition.
‘But we are now debt-free apart from a £6.5m mortgage on the stadium, a large chunk of which is owned by me anyway, and we are close to being in great shape.’
Clearly, Morris invests in people. As he walks around the training ground, expressing particular excitement about a state-of-theart hydrotherapy unit, it becomes clear that he knows everyone’s name.
Just as it is obvious how well he gets on with his chief executive Sam Rush — a lawyer by trade and once a rugby-playing Oxford Blue — and new head coach Paul Clement.
At 43 Clement is probably too young to remember Clough at Derby but Morris is actually a little relieved that Carlo Ancelotti’s former assistant does not share too many similarities with his most famous predecessor.
‘As a fan the Clough years were fantastic,’ says Morris. ‘But as a chairman I think it must have been a nightmare at times for Sam Longson. In my view big egos and football clubs don’t go well together.’
What ego Clement might possess is kept hidden but inside his office he appears to provide a bridge between the past and the present. He has a framed photograph of his late father, Dave, as well as one of his England shirts. ‘It’s a shame he wasn’t around to see my brother (Neil) play and me become a manager,’ he says.
ON HIS desk there is something you do not see too often these days. A bottle of ink. ‘I still like to write with a fountain pen,’ he says. ‘This is actually the pen I used to sign my contract at Real Madrid. The club gave it to me. I
handwrite all my session plans. And I keep an old-fashioned diary.’
As a coach he was schooled in the traditional way. He lacked the pure sporting talent of his father and brother. But after studying for a sports science degree at St Mary’s University in Twickenham he went to Brunel to gain a certificate in education, eventually getting a job as a schoolteacher in Sutton.
The school team weren’t up to much. More successful, however, were his district and county sides. ‘My Surrey team had Nigel ReoCoker, Lenny Pidgeley, Zesh Rehman and Jay Tabb,’ says Clement. ‘Nigel still calls me sir.’
After five years he would leave teaching to focus on a career in coaching, his breakthrough coming when he was asked by Chelsea to become assistant to Guus Hiddink during the Dutchman’s first term as caretaker. After that he embarked on a European tour with Ancelotti, with a brief stop-off in Blackburn.
‘I had a great apprenticeship,’ says Clement. ‘But towards the back end of our time at Paris Saint-Germain I started thinking I’d like to run things my way.
‘The opportunity to go with Carlo to Madrid was too good to turn down but after that I knew it was the right time. I just had to make sure I chose carefully, and Derby felt perfect.
‘The club was in a good position financially with a new, passionate owner from the city. Also important to me was the fact that I wasn’t taking over a team that was struggling.’
Currently second in the Championship, Derby are performing well under Clement. ‘We had a stuttering start but I wasn’t concerned,’ he says. ‘I could see that the wins would come.
‘But it’s massively different, being in charge. When things didn’t go well for Carlo, results wise, I tried to feel what he was feeling. But it’s not the same.
‘I remember talking to Steve Clarke on my way here on my first day. He was still Reading’s manager and I asked him what it was like, compared to when we were assistants at Chelsea. He said you feel it more; you feel everything. It really makes you feel alive. And he’s right. Time has never passed so quickly.’