For a fourth successive season, Derby County and Nottingham Forest will be in separate divisions, with the latter currently having the bragging rights in the overall current state of play in the East Midlands Derby.
In the last couple of seasons, Derby have had to fight back from Championship relegation, and eventually stayed up in the second-tier on the final day of 2024/25, whilst Forest have built on their Premier League status and qualified for the UEFA Europa Conference League, missing out on a UEFA Champions League spot on the final day.
Now, as Derby prepare for a 23rd season out of the last 24 outside the top-flight, and Forest gear up for a return to European football, the gap appears to be growing wider on the pitch.
That gap on the pitch is going to have an impact off it, too, with the TV money that both clubs are set to receive for the 2025/26 season vastly different.
How much TV money Derby & Nottingham Forest will get
A new contract between Sky Sports and the EFL was signed in the summer of 2024, entitling Sky to more matches with EFL clubs receiving bigger payments as a result, by three different means.
The first of which is via a solidarity payment from the Premier League, which is £4.5 million per club, and it is a similar amount that they receive from the EFL for the TV deal, which is split evenly across all 24 Championship clubs.
As well as that, the Rams earn money per individual televised appearance, with the numbers on that varying depending on whether or not they are the home or away team, and based on the slot. Home teams earn around £100,000, whilst the visitors tend to get about £10,000.
John Eustace
Clubs in the Championship that were not in receipt of parachute payments in the 2024/25 campaign received around £11 million, and that is expected to be the same for Derby this season.
In contrast, Nottingham Forest are in the Premier League just at the right time as a new TV deal that will run until the 2028/29 campaign kicks in this summer worth £6.7 billion, which comes to a staggering £3.84 billion after costs.
After costs, it is around 82% that is split evenly between clubs, which is around about £3.148 billion. That means Forest would expect to earn around just over £157 million, just from Premier League TV money.
That doesn’t take into account their potential earnings from UEFA, with Forest set to earn a fair sum from their participation in the UEFA Europa Conference League.
The amount of money earned by a club in Europe is based on the amount of teams that go deep into the competition, so, for example, PSG earned more than they would have done had another French side also gone deep into the UEFA Champions League.
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If English clubs were to perform at a similar level next season as they did this year and Forest replicated Chelsea by winning the competition, then the Reds could expect to earn around £15 million from the competition, taking their overall total beyond £170 million.
Derby will have to be patient to catch their rivals
The appointment of John Eustace in March was an impressive coup by the Rams, as he departed Blackburn Rovers, who were sitting sixth and tucked inside the Championship play-off spots at the time of his departure.
John Eustace's Derby County record
Games
Won
Drawn
Lost
He took over at Derby and almost immediately improved them, finishing outside of the bottom three, having been rock-bottom in the table as late in the season as early March.
General view of Pride Park
However, even as Eustace seeks to shake things up with a fairly lengthy list of unretained players already announced this summer, it will take some time for them to get anywhere near to the financial force that Forest are turning themselves into.
In a league as open as the Championship, it could well be that Derby can push up the table and towards the top six this season, but matching a few years’ worth of Premier League money and then stumbling into the new TV deal as a European qualifier, as Forest have, is some way off for the Rams, with their overall TV money this season set to be over £160 million less than their rivals.