Derby County 2007–08: Going Down in Style
- Graham Dunn
- Sep 24, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 3, 2025
The Derby County 2007–08 campaign remains the gold standard of Premier League misery — a season so bad it became myth. Eleven points, one win, and a record that still stands more than fifteen years later. While Billy Davies and Paul Jewell’s Rams were hopelessly out of their depth, the story is less about failure and more about how football’s cruelest seasons live forever in legend.
While it is a season no Rams fan would ever want to remember, we need to celebrate Derby County’s incredible 11-point tour-de-farce from 2007-08 while we still can.
Given the ever-increasing disparities between even the Premier League hinterland and the Championship, it is inevitable that Derby’s unenviable achievement is going to be beaten.
Southampton gave it their best shot last year before inching past ignominy with 12 points. But it is coming. Seven sides have finished bottom with less than 20 points in the 30 years since the Premier League has been a 20-team division (ignoring points deduction-induced Portsmouth in 2010). Four of those took place in the last 10 years.
Instead, it took one-time Spurs boss and London Underground specialist Christian Gross to break the run
The average points tally of the bottom club over the first 10 years of the 20-team Premier League era was 28.8 points. Over the last 10 years it is down to 20.7 points.
But fair play to Derby. They hit their lows at a time when it wasn’t fashionable. Watford and West Brom, the bottom sides either year of Derby in 2008, went down with 28 and 32 points respectively. Even an obviously out-of-their-depth Swindon Town mustered 30 points back in 1994.
When things go that badly wrong, financial collapse is often at the root of the problems. While ownership and investment uncertainties were definitely issues – Derby had changed chief executive, chairman and ownership by the end of January – it was probably more a case of Derby getting promoted too soon.
There had been few expectations of a push for the top-flight when Billy Davies took charge the previous year - Derby having finished two places above the drop zone.
But Derby won promotion through the play-offs, leaving them playing catch-up in terms of readying the squad for the Premier League. Derby did not catch-up. Though they did spend more than £10 million on players, including forwards Robert Earnshaw and Kenny Miller and centre-back Claude Davis, the squad was still some way short.
An opening day point at home to Portsmouth and narrow defeat at Man City gave no indication of the carnage to come, as Derby sat outside the bottom three. But heavy subsequent defeats saw publicity-hawks Paddy Power pay out on a Derby relegation after six games.
A 1-0 win over Newcastle was to be Derby’s only win all season. By late November Davies was gone, with Paul Jewell installed as manager. The latter’s stock was relatively high after successful spells at Premier League underdogs Bradford City and Wigan Athletic, but he could do nothing to stop the rot. Neither did a glut of senior pro January arrivals – most of them on free transfers – including Roy Carrol, Robbie Savage, Alan Stubbs and Danny Mills.
By March, with six games left, Derby were relegated – ironically after picking up a rare point at home to Fulham. That was to be their last point, and they ended the season with six straight defeats to confirm their place in football history.
Derby, though, are far from alone in enduring such a nightmare. And at least it was only one season.
More than 100 years earlier, Lancashire club Darwen could lay claim to one of the most inauspicious spells in the football league. Darwen joined the first division when it was expanded to 14 teams in 1891-92. That year they became the first club to be relegated – clocking up a top-flight record 12-0 loss to WBA along the way – and thus they became founder members of the second division.
The original yo-yo club, Darwen won promotion back to the top division, only to be relegated again the following season. Five years later in the 1898-99 season, a new nadir was reached. Darwen lost 18 consecutive matches – still a record despite Sunderland’s valiant efforts in 2003 – and conceded a record 141 goals.
More recently, in Germany Schalke 04 endured a nightmare run. Here financial challenges, exacerbated by the pandemic impact, were a major contributing factor.
Unlike Derby and Darwen, Schalke had become top-flight regulars – spending 30 years in Bundesliga 1 and finishing second as recently as 2017. However, things started to go wrong in the 2019-20 season. While under former Borussia Dortmund and Huddersfield Town boss David Wagner, Schalke finished a respectable 12th - this only told half the story.
A win on the first game back after the winter break meant Schalke had won half of their 18 games – and lost only three times. However, they failed to win again that season – either before or after the Covid interruption, losing 10 of their last 16 games.
Neither did it get better the following season. An opening day 8-0 hammering at Bayen Munich set the tone for a further run of 14 league games without a win. They were not to taste league victory until a 4-0 win at home to 1899 Hoffenheim on 9 January. That was just eight days shy of a year since their last league win (and one game short of matching the German winless record of 31 games).
Fair play to Derby. They hit their lows at a time when it wasn’t fashionable
By this stage Schalke were on manager number four. Wagner had left after the Bayen humiliation, Manuel Baum went 10 games without winning, while even the brief return of legend Huub Stevens – who managed Schalke to the UEFA Cup in 1987 – did nothing. Instead, it took one-time Spurs boss and London Underground specialist Christian Gross to break the run. That victory came in his second game. By the start of March, Gross was gone too. Under a fifth manager, Dimitrios Grammozis, Schalke did at least pick up a couple more wins on the way to confirming relegation with a low of 16 points.
So far so good. But it’s at this point Brechin City say, ‘hold my pint’.
After promotion back to the Scottish Championship for the first time in 11 years, Brechin managed to go through the entire 2017-18 season without recording a league win. Just four draws all season. No points of any kind from 18 away matches. And finishing just the 43 points from safety.
In fairness to the board, they kept faith with player-manager Darren Dods – who had got them promoted in the first place – for the next season. While he quit playing to focus on managing, there was to be no happy ending as he was sacked in October and Brechin went on to a second consecutive relegation.
How We Ranked Them
We have five categories of greatness from our five-star All-Time Greats category at the top to our one-star Blinkered Greats category at the bottom. Obviously.
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BLINKERED GREATS
Listen To The Podcast
Hosts Graham Dunn and Jamie Rooney — joined by Sunderland fan Phil Craig — no stranger to humiliating Premier League seasons, joined us for this dive around the special lows achieved by Derby County, Darwen, Schalke and Brechin City. Reliving Derby County 2007–08, football’s ultimate disaster season. From Billy Davies’ surprise promotion to Paul Jewell’s chaos and a single win over Newcastle, it’s the anatomy of a glorious failure.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, none of the worst-performing Premier League side of all time ever graced the Oxford yellow. However, Oxford’s current goalkeeping coach Lewis Price was at Derby at the time, playing eight games between Stephen Bywater’s injury and Roy Carroll’s signing. He even tasted victory, playing in a penalties win at Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup third round.