Football has more than its share of curses, but Derby County's is one of the better documented in English club folklore, and it is tied to a real and specific act rather than a vague run of bad luck. When the club secured permanent ownership of the Baseball Ground, on what is now Vulcan Street in Derby, it evicted a group of Romani gypsies who had been camped on the land. Local rumour was quick to hold that this eviction had brought a curse down on the club, one that would prevent Derby County from ever winning the FA Cup.
What followed did, at least for a long stretch, fit the story. Between 1896 and 1903 Derby reached three FA Cup finals and lost every one of them, a genuinely striking run of near misses for a club otherwise competitive enough to keep reaching the final. After 1903 the club did not return to an FA Cup final at all until 1946, a gap of over four decades that gave the curse plenty of time to settle into accepted local belief rather than a passing joke.
The curse's supposed breaking is the best part of the story. Ahead of the 1946 final against Charlton Athletic, a representative of the club is said to have sought out and met with the Romani community in an attempt to have the curse lifted. During the final itself, with the score locked at 1-1, the match ball burst, an unusual and highly visible event that was widely read by those watching as a sign that whatever hex had hung over the club for fifty years had finally broken. Derby went on to win the replayed passage of the match 4-1, taking the FA Cup for the first time in the club's history.
The Baseball Ground itself no longer exists as a football stadium; Derby County moved to Pride Park in 1997, and the old ground was demolished and redeveloped into housing not long after. The curse, real or not, belongs now entirely to the club's folklore rather than to any site that can still be visited, but it remains one of English football's most solidly repeated superstitions, tied to a specific act, a specific unlucky period, and a specific, oddly dramatic moment of apparent release.
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