Derby County will forever rue £3m Sheffield United agreement | OneFootball

Derby County's 2007/08 Premier League season was a disaster, and one defender signed that summer is now remembered as one of their worst-ever buys.

Derby County will always have cause to look back with regret at their summer recruitment in 2007.

The Rams had just been promoted back to the Premier League after finishing third in the Championship and winning the play-offs, and strengthening the first-team squad was imperative if they were going to give themselves the best chance of staying up.

Ten new players arrived at Pride Park that summer, a combination of experienced players such as Kenny Miller and Robert Earnshaw, signings from the EFL, and one player, American midfielder Benny Feilhaber, brought in from abroad.

And it would be one of the recruits from the League who would find himself in the unfortunate position of proving himself to be hopelessly out of his depth at this level as Derby suffered in the top flight like no other club has, before or since.

Claude Davis had already been another club's record transfer fee

Jamaican international Claude Davis was signed for £3 million from Sheffield United in July 2007. Davis had only been with the Blades for a season, having been signed by them just over a year earlier.

They'd only just been promoted into the Premier League and were relegated at the end of his one season at Bramall Lane, but only by the narrowest of margins, going down by one goal on goal difference.

United had been persuaded to pay Preston North End a club-record £3 million for him after he ended the 2005/06 season as their Player's and Supporters Player of the Year.

Both Derby and Davis were out of their depth in the Premier League

Derby's 2007/08 season started badly, and only really got worse from there. They recorded their first league win of the season against Newcastle United on the 17th September 2007, but this would prove to be their only one of the entire season. It proved to be a record-breakingly bad season for the club. Derby ended it on 11 points, relegated by 25 points.

And a large proportion of the problem was an extremely leaky defence. The Rams conceded six goals in a single league match four times that season, including twice in sixteen days at home against Aston Villa and Arsenal in April 2008. In their 38 matches they conceded 89 goals, 23 more than the next worst and more than four times as many as that season's champions, Manchester United.

Davis, by this time, had been thoroughly found out. He appeared clumsy, and with poor positional sense, which gave opposing forwards enough space to be able to repeatedly punish his team. Every aspect of his defensive play fell short of the standards required. And in February, it was confirmed that he would miss the rest of the season with a knee ligament injury, to something like a sigh of relief from supporters.

After a season in the Championship during which he was essentially frozen out of the team, Davis was released by Derby that summer and signed for Crystal Palace, going on to play for Crawley Town and Rotherham United before retiring in 2014. Derby haven't returned to the Premier League since.

Some players simply aren't cut out for the top flight, and the arrival of Davis at Pride Park was part of a bigger story, with a takeover going on behind the scenes and muddled transfer activity in both the summer and January transfer windows, which left them no stronger in the Premier League than they had been in the Championship a year earlier.

Seventeen years on, Derby supporters have good cause to regret the choices their club made, from the point that promotion to the Premier League was confirmed in 2007.