sport news Sunderland director Charlie Methven says Derby County's crisis will take years ...

Derby County fans need to buckle in for a bumpy ride and accept it could be years before their club is back where they believe it belongs, if it survives the current crisis.

Football club executives who have faced financial meltdown and come out the other side warn that sorting out debts and finding the right buyer is a huge challenge, but assuming it can be done, that is only the beginning of the road to recovery.

Once stable, the club's culture has to change, too, so everyone from the cleaner to the centre forward gives their all for the cause, and understands the importance of value for money.

If Rams' fans think administration will usher in a brave new era overnight, they may be disappointed. There are years of struggle ahead.

'It takes a long time for everyone to start pushing in the same direction,' said Charlie Methven, a shareholder and director at Sunderland, who helped pull the Black Cats out of a disastrous financial situation three years ago.

'It is a long road before enough people have been moved on, other people recruited, everyone knows the plan and there are no lingering politics.

'When the financial situation stabilises, supporters expect things to be turned around overnight on the pitch, but the right culture has to be created behind the scenes if the club is to get on a roll of success. Once the club is stable and gets that right, that roll can last for a decade.'

Three years after the Black Cats' faced their financial crisis, the club is in the black and looks better prepared than ever to mount a sustained promotion push back to the Championship. 

If Derby achieves that from where it is today, then it will have done well. The Rams are now bottom of the Championship after a 12 point deduction for going into administration.

It's been reported up to 20 staff have been made redundant.

'I know it is not a glamorous thing, but it makes me very proud that Sunderland today is debt free, break-even and all of the assets - the stadium, CAT 1 academy, training ground and women’s team - are still 100% in the club's ownership and in good shape,' said Methven. 'The final piece of the jigsaw now is for the first team to drag the club back up the leagues.'

Sunderland went top of League One on Tuesday last week, before slipping back to second after defeat at Portsmouth. With the exception of Saturday, their performances to back up their lofty position. The Black Cats are now looking good on and off the field.

But, Sunderland's situation in 2018 bore a strong resemblance to Derby now. The Wearside club had declined on the pitch, bombed out of the Premier League and crashed straight through the Championship into League One, where the Rams look to be headed as a result of points deductions.

Sunderland were losing £20 million a year and were £160 million in debt when they landed in the third tier. Around half of that debt rested with an aggressive lender at nine per cent interest per annum.

The freefall had been overseen by Ellis Short, a wealthy owner who wanted to sell, couldn't find a buyer and hung on in hope, while the crisis depended, before turning off the spending taps and exiting.

Methven, Juan Sartori and Stewart Donald bought Sunderland off Short in May that year. And they found costs running out of control and a culture that accepted - even inadvertently encouraged - failure and over-spending after years of decline.

'It seeps into the walls,' said Methven. 'When I arrived at Durham railway station on my way to the Stadium of Light, I was met by a liveried chauffeur in a club limousine! They had a fleet of three - and they were in League One.'

It was clear costs would had to be cut dramatically.

'I was actually relieved when I saw that because my fear was there was no fat to cut. But I thought, 'if they still have chauffeurs the first round of cost-cutting would be relatively painless'.

'There were Premier League practices. The team had been travelling by plane to matches with luxury coaches meeting them off the plane and staying in five-star hotels.'

The club was also paying consultants thousands of pounds a year to move plastic pot plants around the club offices every week.

These extreme examples were indicative of deeper problems in which contracts had run out of control, agents were filling their boots and players had lost focus and motivation. In that environment it was impossible to find success on the field.

'Sunderland started going in the wrong direction from around 2010. In the years after, there had been plenty of able people at the club, but they were not able to turn it around,' said Methven. 'The culture change had not happened. And that change is not as easy as people think.'

Sunderland were able to avoid administration by the skin of their teeth, which with fierce cost cutting, some remaining parachute payments and an ambitious revenue-raising plan meant they could cling on to their key assets, like the stadium and category one academy (although the club did close the cryotherapy unit because it cost so much too run).

Sunderland galvanised their supporters and attracted gates of more than 30,000 to start the money flowing. Methven and co’s marketing strategy included asking the fans to help refurbish the stadium and signing up for a second series of the acclaimed Netflix documentary ‘Sunderland ‘Til I Die’.

Whilst not having the benefit of parachute payments, in one way Derby have been more fortunate. They have already cut their wage bill and reduced costs, while Sunderland’s decline was so quick that it sank into League One with Premier League contracts worth tens of millions.

However, they are weaker because owner Mel Morris was forced to call in the administrators almost two weeks ago after, unlike Short at Sunderland, failing to find a last-gasp buyer. The stadium has already been sold.

The administrators will try to make sense of the debts – estimated to be £60 million plus – and sell the club as a going concern. Somehow that figure will need to be crunched down to make Derby attractive to a prospective owner and the Category One academy risks being sacrificed as too expensive.

More than 60 interested parties went through the books at Sunderland and walked away, before Methven’s group took over and he says it is a similar case at Derby, where two bids have already publicly collapsed.

Derby County's administrators Quantuma say they have received seven of eight 'credible' bids to buy the club in a week. But the fact is a suitable buyer is not easy to find and Derby have now lost control of that process.

At Sunderland, Donald, Sartori and Methven turned down some lucrative offers because they did not think the prospective

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