Derby County's £2.5m Reading gamble ultimately backfired | OneFootball

Nick Blackman tore up the Championship at the start of the 2015/1 season, but he couldn't replicate that form at Derby

It felt like season after season back in the day that Derby County were pushing to make the Premier League, and all the while they were pushing their finances to the limit off the pitch to try and fulfill their dream.

It was a goal that the Rams were ultimately never able to realise, and instead they ended up in League One not too long after, but they can at least say they never went down without trying.

In the mid-to-late 2010s, Derby were one of the Championship's heaviest investors, and some would argue one of the most attractive clubs to sign for in the league, so there can't be many fans who can grumble that their side didn't have a go at getting back into the top-flight.

That heavy investment ultimately caught up with the club eventually, with a series of off-field financial issues plaguing the club and perhaps playing part in why they've struggled in recent history.

One financial decision which certainly played into that issue was the signing of Nick Blackman, who ultimately proved to be a massive flop in the Midlands.

Nick Blackman was the name on everyone's lips in January 2016

Although £2.5m in the modern game may not seem the type of fee that would break the bank, nine years ago it was still a respectable fee at Championship level and was believed to be what Derby paid to acquire Blackman's services from Reading.

According to then-Derby boss Paul Clement, the Rams beat off a lot of interest to sign Blackman, who at the time was one of the leading scorers in the Championship, after pulling up trees with Reading in the first half of the campaign.

Blackman had scored 11 times in 25 Championship outings prior in 2015/16 to his move to Derby, and it was widely expected that he would be the man whose goals clinched the Rams' return to the Premier League, but those assumptions were wildly inaccurate.

Sometimes, in football, players just don't fit certain clubs, and Derby's attempt to create the Galactico's of the Championship certainly wasn't the right place for Blackman, who never fitted in at the club.

Perhaps the pressure of coming in and being the man touted to fire the club back to the top-flight was too much for him, or maybe he was better suited to being a big fish in a smaller pond in Berkshire, but either way, his Derby spell was a disaster.

Nick Blackman's career nosedived after leaving Reading

The move to Pride Park couldn't possibly have gone much worse for Blackman - he didn't score again in the 2015/16 campaign and Derby were ultimately unsuccessful in the play-offs, so nothing worked in his favour.

That was symptomatic of his spell at Derby in general, as he only scored one goal for the club - and even that was a penalty - which just about sums up how poorly his spell went.

Loan spells to Maccabi Tel Aviv and Sporting Gijon did little to revive his career afterwards, but the Israeli side had seen enough to sign him on a free contract in 2019 after his Derby contract had expired to bring the curtain down on a disastrous spell in his career.

He was never able to rediscover the kind of form he showed in that 2015/16 season at Reading for Maccabi and his career fizzled out into insignificance in the end, but Derby were the ultimate losers in everything as they saw absolutely no return on their healthy 2016 investment.