Derby County struck 21-goal transfer gold - but Pride Park had to wait for it | OneFootball

Forward Matej Vydra had two very contrasting seasons with Derby County, but they recorded a profit when they came to sell him.

Derby County ended up getting both goals and a profit from Matej Vydra, but the striker's time at Pride Park would end up being a spell of two halves.

By the summer of 2016, Derby County were starting to get desperate for a return to the Premier League. They'd last been there eight years earlier, with the 2007-08 season ending with an ignominious relegation with a record low points tally of 11.

The arrival of Mel Morris at the club in 2014 seemed to signal a change in the club's fortunes. Morris, a multi-millionaire businessman and Rams fan, bought a minority shareholding in the club in 2014 and bought the club altogether the following year, and his money, it was believed could be the deciding factor in getting the club back to the top-flight.

Morris's dreams for the club would flounder, almost killing Derby altogether, but initially it looked as though he could be the man to get them back there. The 2015-16 season saw them finish 5th in the Championship before losing in the play-off semi-finals to Hull City, but once the disappointment of that loss had worn off it was time to start looking around for the players who could get the Rams back to the promised land.

Matej Vydra first truly caught the eye at Watford before Derby County switch

Matej Vydra was born in Chotěboř, a small yet historic town of 9,000 people in the centre of the Czech Republic. He started his academy career with the local football club before moving onto FC Vysočina Jihlava, another Czech club, for whom he made his senior professional debut in 2008, before moving on to Banik Ostrava two years later.

By this time his talents were being seen from abroad, and he only lasted six months in Ostrava before moving to the Italian club Udinese in June 2010. After a loan period in Belgium with Club Brugge was curtailed by injury, he moved to Watford on loan in 2012 and was an immediate hit, scoring 20 goals for the Hornets and being voted the Championship Player of the Year.

The following season he was sent on loan to England again, this time to West Bromwich Albion. There he was less successful, scoring three goals in 23 League appearances throughout the 2013-14 season, but a return to Vicarage Road saw him get back on track, with 16 goals in 42 appearances being enough to see Watford make his move permanent in the summer of 2015, shortly after the Hornets won promotion to the Premier League.

Again, though, he was loaned out, this time to Reading, where he scored three in 31 appearances. With Watford having held their own in the Premier League with a degree of comfort, the decision was made to move him on permanently in the summer of 2016.

Matej Vydra's two seasons at Derby County couldn't have been more contrasting

Derby County left their transfer business late in the summer of 2016. No new players were brought in until getting on towards the end of the transfer window, with the first of them not arriving until less than a week before the window closed.

Matej Vydra signed for Derby County on the 27th August 2016 for a fee of £8 million, the second time they'd broken their club record transfer fee within the previous twelve months, but the Rams had a disastrous start to the season, especially in front of goal. By the middle of September they'd only scored two in their first eight games of the season, and after they lost their ninth 2-1 at home to Blackburn Rovers, manager Nigel Pearson was sacked.

Former England manager Steve McClaren was Pearson's replacement, and things did start to turn around for Derby, if not necessarily for Vydra. He'd scored his first League goal for the club in that loss to Blackburn, but the goals didn't flow. Throughout that first season he could only manage five in 33 league appearances for the club.

McClaren lasted six months in the managerial position. After a 3-0 loss at Brighton in March, he was sacked and replaced by Gary Rowett. Derby finished the season in 9th place in the table, some way short of expectations but nowhere near as bad as it looked like it might have been in the middle of September.

Despite an extremely disappointing first season at Pride Park, Rowett kept faith in Vydra and accordingly earned his reward. The striker got back to the sort of form that he'd previously shown at Watford, bagging 21 league goals in 40 appearances for the Rams as they rose to 6th place in the Championship table and earned themselves a play-off place, with Vydra himself topping the second-tier scoring charts.

For neither the first nor last time under the ownership of Mel Morris, though, the Rams would come unstuck in the play-offs. After winning the first leg of their semi-final against Fulham 1-0 at Pride Park, they lost the return match 2-0 to lose 2-1 on aggregate. Rowett quit Pride Park and was replaced by Frank Lampard.

The summer of 2018 would also see the end of Matej Vydra's time at Derby County. A proposed move to Leeds United collapsed after the personal terms couldn't be agreed but Burnley, who'd just finished 7th in the Premier League, were impressed enough by what they'd seen of him to offer Derby £11 million for his services and took him to Turf Moor shortly before the closure of that summer's transfer window.

But Matej Vydra and Burnley never quite gelled. He only scored eight goals in 82 appearances for the Clarets over his four years with them, and despite the offer of a new contract when his original one expired in 2022, he turned it down to return to the Czech Republic to sign for Vitoria Plzen, for whom he still plays to this day.

Derby County had one last serious go at promotion the following season, but when they lost the play-off final in 2019 to Aston Villa, the wheels fell off their wagon. Almost fatally hamstrung by the financial excesses of those years, the club collapsed into administration and it took the rescue of the club by David Clowes to keep them alive.