Presenter Chris Coles and ex-Derby County player and coach Eric Steele discussed all of the latest Derby news on the most recent edition of BBC Radio Derby’s Sportscene Podcast and Steele spent some time looking ahead to the January transfer window during the show.
The Rams have won just one of their 11 Championship games so far this season and they have got 11 more Championship games to play before the transfer window officially re-opens on 2nd January.
During this podcast, Steele discussed the importance of the upcoming January transfer window and indicated that he thinks the business that the club does in this window could make the difference between relegation and survival for bottom-of-the-table Derby.
He said: “Whoever is in charge when that January window comes in, it’s going to be vital because we will live and die – we’ll either live in this league or die out in this league – with the recruitment that we make [on] January the 1st because at the moment, we aren’t good enough, are we? The table doesn’t lie.”
Do Derby need to sign players in January to avoid being relegated this season?
YES
NO
TIF Thoughts on what Steele had to say about the January transfer window…
Last season, Derby finished in 10th place in the Championship table, however, it may be fair to say that some important players departed from the Rams during the summer.
Their second-highest league goalscorer for the 2019/20 campaign, Chris Martin, left the club on a free transfer, while they sold both Jayden Bogle – who played the fourth-highest total of league minutes of any Rams player last term – and Max Lowe, who earned the fourth-highest overall WhoScored match rating in the league last season, to Sheffield United for a combined transfer fee of £6.94m.
Perhaps those departures made Derby’s squad weaker and maybe that is one of the reasons why Steele thinks that they “aren’t good enough” right now.
It is difficult to definitively say whether or not those departures are the main reason for Derby’s struggles this term, but it is clear that following those departures, the club is not on course to finish as high up the table as they did last season, so perhaps they have, thus far, failed to adequately replace the players that left and at present, it does look like they are going to have to try and do that in the January transfer window, as Steele suggested, to get out of their current situation.