€600k Derby County decision will still haunt Rams supporters: View | OneFootball

Derby County only spent money on three transfers in the 2014/15 season, with one of them being a player the club will want to forget ever played at Pride Park.

That season, manager Steve McClaren led the club to an eighth-placed finish, a drop-off from a third-place finish the year prior.

They lost in the play-off places that year, as QPR won promotion to the Premier League at Wembley Stadium at the expense of The Rams.

One of the reasons for this poor performance was the January addition of Raul Albentosa, who failed to impress in his limited appearances for Derby in the second half of the season.

Derby signed Raul Albentosa for €600 in 2015

In the January of 2017, Derby signed Albentosa as the latest addition to their back four. The centre half made a move to Pride Park for a fee of €600k in that, which was the price needed to activate the minimum-fee release clause in his contract.

He came into the club with much fanfare, with the club hoping to push on towards promotion back to the Premier League for the first time since 2008.

Albentosa claimed it was a dream of his to play in England after signing, and wanted to do his best to impress the fans at his new club.

“I am very proud to be here. It’s always been a dream of mine to come and play in England and I am going to do everything to say thank you to the people that brought me here and gave this chance.”

Sadly, the six-foot-five centre-half did not manage to get the fans on his side in a disastrous single season in the English leagues. He signed a two-and-a-half contract with Derby when he signed, but Albentosa did not even last one of those years in England.

He left the club after just one season to return to Spain

Despite the hype surrounding his signing, Albentosa did not make a big impact at Pride Park.

He was instrumental in Eibar's promotion to La Liga, and looked to be a shrewd signing by the Derby board in January.

In a short six-month stint at the club, Albentosa's performances were nowhere know as good as the fans expected.

He didn't make his league debut in March that year, owing to injuries suffered after joining the club. This made his short run even shorter, with just two months of playtime to show the club how good he could be.

The Spaniard played only nine times for his new club, which included eight league matches and one FA Cup tie. All-but-one of those matches saw him starting, although results were not what he would hope. The Rams only achieved one league win with him on the pitch, where he played right-back in a 2-0 victory over Wigan Athletic.

The club won just eight points with him in the team, while they won four and drew two in the six games before he returned to the bench after his injury. The drop-off in form cannot just be assigned to Albentosa, but it is certainly a factor.

It was especially a factor during one of the club's most crucial matches that season.

In the final game of the campaign, Derby needed just one point at home to Reading to secure themselves a place in the play-offs, with their superior goal difference against Ipswich Town giving them a leg up over their opposition.

However, he lost his players for the first two goals of the game, as Reading romped home with a 3-0 victory.

This made the club miss out on the top six, and cost McClaren his job. Paul Clement replaced him in the summer, but the die had been cast on Albentosa's future.

He was loaned to Malaga in the summer, before joining Deportivo de La Coruna in the summer of 2016 on a permanent transfer.

This put an end to his torrid time at Derby.

His performances contributed to Derby missing out on a potential promotion and cost the manager his job, so it is hard to say he was anything but an abject failure at Pride Park.