Nottingham Forest’s Astonishing Rise: A Premier League Fairytale
NOTTINGHAM, England — “Surprised?” said John O’Hare, a name synonymous with Nottingham Forest’s golden era. O’Hare, who graced the pitch for Forest 101 times during the late 1970s and early 1980s, couldn’t hide his astonishment. “I would say so. Astonished,” he added, as he strolled past the grandstand at City Ground. This was the very place where Forest, currently sitting third in the Premier League, were set to face Brighton that afternoon. Behind him, the echoes of past glories under the legendary Brian Clough were emblazoned in white against the red façade: “Champions of Europe 1979” and “Champions of Europe 1980.” O’Hare was part of those illustrious European Cup-winning teams. A decade later, as Clough’s era drew to a close, Forest reached two domestic cup finals before sinking into obscurity.
O’Hare remains a fixture at City Ground, attending every home game. Like nearly everyone else, he didn’t foresee this remarkable turnaround. When asked if he would have been satisfied with a midtable finish this season, given that only the three newly promoted clubs were more likely to be relegated according to betting odds, he chuckled. It’s a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t have been content with that?
Yet here we are, with Nottingham Forest challenging for a top-four finish and a coveted spot in next season’s Champions League. And why not dream a little bigger? They could become the only club outside the Premier League’s Big Six, besides Leicester City in 2016, to clinch the title in the 21st century.
The only ones not bewildered by this meteoric rise are those orchestrating it. “We went on a really good run at the start of the season, picked up a lot of points early,” explained Ryan Yates, the Forest captain. “That’s obviously really big coming off the back of just staying up in consecutive seasons. There wasn’t one moment, but I feel like the momentum grew, and the confidence grew with it.”
Just a few months ago, Brighton and Brentford, with their data-driven approaches, were the poster children for how financially constrained clubs could compete against the likes of Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham. These six clubs, due to their historical significance and financial clout, were invited to join the proposed Super League in 2021.
But how do we explain Nottingham Forest’s resurgence? Owned by the Cretan billionaire Evangelos Marinakis, a colorful figure who faced and was acquitted of charges of match-fixing and drug smuggling by Greek prosecutors, Forest were promoted back to England’s top tier in 2022. What followed was a whirlwind of activity.
That summer, the club signed 22 new players, essentially assembling two entire teams from scratch, setting a Football Association record. The $185 million spent in three months surpassed the club’s entire previous spending history. The season had barely begun when head of recruitment George Syrianos and scouting director Andy Scott, who orchestrated those transfers, were dismissed by Marinakis. In January, Filippo Giraldi, Syrianos’ successor, brought in six more players. By April, with the club in the relegation zone, Giraldi was also shown the door. Marinakis demanded immediate improvement.
And improve they did. Forest secured their Premier League status by defeating Arsenal at home on the penultimate weekend. To celebrate, Marinakis and Ross Wilson, who replaced Giraldi as sporting director, acquired 13 more players. The total expenditure reached approximately $240 million on 34 signings over 18 months. While the spree seemed excessive, akin to a budget version of Chelsea, it yielded some genuine talent. Most of the current squad was assembled during those transfer windows.
Under new manager Nuno Espirito Santo, Forest survived another season despite a four-point deduction for breaching profit and sustainability rules. This set the stage for their current campaign. “Look, we believed in ourselves last season,” said striker Chris Wood. “At the start of this season, we wanted to go on and do better things than what we’ve been doing in the past. We know we’ve got a squad capable of that. So it’s all about building, and continuing to strive for excellence, and being better every week.”
Espirito Santo’s Forest may not be the most entertaining team in the Premier League, but they are effective. In stark contrast to the intricate ball-control tactics of other top clubs, they play as if they’re a man down, trading possession for territory, patiently waiting to exploit an opponent’s mistake. They’ve lost just five games in the Premier League all season, yet have possessed the ball less than 40% of the time.
But is this success an illusion? The week before the Brighton game, they suffered a 5-0 drubbing at Bournemouth. Brighton, on the other hand, was in fine form, having lost only once since mid-December. Yet they played into Espirito Santo’s hands, fielding five attackers and only one true midfielder, with a daringly high defensive line. Forest countered early and often. Despite being out-possessed nearly 2 to 1, Forest scored two goals in the opening 25 minutes, Wood added a hat trick to seal the victory, and they tacked on two more goals after the 89th minute, conceding nothing.
Researchers scrambled to find the last time Forest had won a top-flight game by such a margin. They discovered it was back before the Premier League era, a 7-0 demolition of Chelsea on April 20, 1991, with Clough at the helm. An old-timer in the press room remarked that it seemed like a good omen.
Transfer Deadline Day: A New Approach
Just after noon on transfer deadline day earlier this month, sporting director Wilson was giving a visitor a leisurely tour of the renovated training grounds. Uncharacteristically, Forest had brought in only one player, the young Reading defender Tyler Bindon, who was immediately loaned back to Reading after his physical. As Wilson walked through the training room, he spotted Bindon on an examination table and greeted him cheerfully. He could afford to be relaxed because his business was done. That meant retaining Forest’s best players throughout the January window, with only James Ward-Prowse departing, recalled from his loan by West Ham.
For other clubs on the fringes of the Premier League’s upper echelons, like Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth, and even Aston Villa, the blueprint for success involves identifying and nurturing young talent, then selling that talent at a profit to fund future acquisitions. “That, in turn, helps us to bridge the gap between the revenues we can generate from match day operations and TV rights, and what the bigger clubs can do,” said Paul Barber, Brighton’s chief executive.
Marinakis, however, has a different vision for Nottingham Forest. He sees them as a two-time European Cup winner. (It’s worth noting that only two Premier League clubs, Liverpool and Manchester United, have been champions of Europe more often.) He fully expects Forest to reclaim their place among English football’s elite.
Accordingly, offers for Morgan Gibbs-White and Murillo, two key members of the current squad, were rejected, even though Chelsea’s reported $100m bid for Murillo would have been a record transfer for Forest. “The fans here understand this club’s place in European history,” Wilson said. “They understand that this is a club that has achieved big things in the past. They understand that there’s an owner that wants to achieve big things in the future.”
Marinakis, who also owns the Greek club Olympiakos, which won last season’s Europa Conference League, is a man of grand ambitions. To his credit, he has made significant changes to Forest off the field. The three buildings that make up the training ground may still look the same from the outside as they did in Clough’s time, but inside, they now have baristas serving coffee and new equipment everywhere. “The room we’re sitting in wasn’t here seven months ago,” Wilson noted. “There’s a new player gym. There’s a new medical area. There’s a new restaurant, a new kitchen, a new team room, a new analysis room. Everything is new.”
Nuno Espirito Santo’s Transformation
By some accounts, Espirito Santo has also undergone a transformation. At Wolves, where he managed from 2017 to 2021, achieving consecutive seventh-place finishes, he showed little interest in analytics. (One club analyst at the time said he could only get him to consider data-driven findings by having first-team manager Ian Cathro present them, without the numerical underpinning, as his own ideas.) But after spending the 2022-23 season guiding Al-Ittihad to the Saudi Pro League title, he returned to England with a more flexible approach to winning football matches. That includes using data, Wilson emphasizes, though Nuno still runs his club with the same confident demeanor. “Nuno is a man who exudes an air of ‘he knows what he’s doing,'” Wilson said. “The players can feel that.”
And in truth, Nuno’s football philosophy has hardly changed, even though he now has European qualification in his sights instead of a relegation battle. “Through the good and the bad, the manager has stayed extremely consistent to his values,” Yates said. “He’s not deviated. And when he has a calm head, it means we do too.”
Much of the roster consists of reclamation projects. Gibbs-White never fulfilled his potential at Wolves. Anthony Elanga was cast off by Manchester United. Wood joined after two lackluster seasons at Newcastle; Forest is, incredibly, the 15th club in his 19-year senior career. Neco Williams was deemed expendable by Liverpool. How many of them could start for one of the Big Six?
It turns out that might not matter. Despite the squad turnover a couple of years ago, Espirito Santo has since curated a small, tightly-knit squad, allowing the players to grow together. And for all his bravado, Marinakis has instilled a sense of purpose throughout the organization. “You have to have the right players, the right dressing room, and the right support staff, from the owner down to the people at the training ground,” Wood said. “That makes a big difference. I think they’ve done superbly well. It’s a credit to the owner: buying into it, understanding the process, and creating a great environment for us to work in. And then we’ve got to do it on the pitch.”
That means facing Fulham, Newcastle, Arsenal, and Manchester City in the next four fixtures. But in this season of relative parity in the Premier League, only Liverpool seems to be operating at a higher level. And Forest, the only visitors to win at Anfield in nearly a year, have taken four points off the league leaders, more than any other club.
This has been a fortunate season for Forest to be in contention, the first since Pep Guardiola’s arrival in 2016-17 that Manchester City wasn’t poised to win the league, accumulate 100 points, or both. Manchester United and Tottenham are closer to the bottom than the top of the table, Chelsea remains inconsistent, and even second-place Arsenal doesn’t seem particularly daunting. If not for a nine-point gap and Liverpool’s form, Forest would be contending to be the next Leicester City.
And maybe, improbably, they still are. “I’m rooting for Nottingham to win,” said Bill Foley, who owns Bournemouth. “I’m an admirer. They’re doing great. They’re an inspiration for us. We just want to be where they are.”
The Financial Landscape and Future Challenges
It’s a given that the wealthiest English clubs generate more revenue than all but a few clubs worldwide, but the rest of the Premier League does too. This has helped clubs like Forest become competitive. Even Brentford and Bournemouth, with little or no history in English football’s top tier and no Champions League experience, have more financial clout than clubs like Borussia Dortmund, Porto, and Olympique Marseille, which have actually won it. Barber reports that Brighton last season not only turned a bigger profit, after taxes, than any other club in Europe’s top leagues, but it was the most profitable season in the history of the sport.
So while the Big Six still possess much of the top talent, the rest of the clubs are arguably closer than they’ve been in years. It also helps not to be playing in Europe, especially for a manager who maintains a small squad.
Aston Villa finished fourth in the Premier League last season and qualified for the Champions League for the first time. This season, in the weekend games following Champions League competition on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they’ve managed just one win against three draws and four losses. “You’re playing so many games, and we’re feeling the brunt of that this year,” said Wes Edens, one of Villa’s co-owners. “And they’re really intense games. Forest is a little bit like what we were last year. They’ve outperformed and they’ve surprised people, but they’re not playing in the Champions League yet. It is easier.”
Apart from Villa and the prodigiously funded Newcastle last season, some combination of the same six clubs represents England in the Champions League year after year. And only four times since the 1980s has an outsider won the FA Cup. When a club does manage to do something remarkable, such as Leicester City in 2016 or Wigan’s FA Cup run in 2013, it’s nearly always limited to a single season. “The trick,” Barber said, “is to sustain it. To carry it from one season to another to another. That’s what’s hard for clubs of our size to do. We’ll see with Nottingham Forest whether they can repeat this.”
It won’t be easy. At least half a dozen Forest players have been linked in transfer speculation with one rival or another. Even if Marinakis doesn’t want to let anyone go, the allure of playing at Old Trafford or the Emirates can be seductive to an emerging star. And while this has been the most challenging season in memory for the Big Six, all those clubs have money at their disposal. While Forest were doing nothing this window, for example, Manchester City were spending more than $200m.
It isn’t only the players that are coveted: the pipeline of executives from smaller to larger clubs is every bit as robust. Last summer, sporting director Richard Hughes, who built Bournemouth’s squad and hired Andoni Iraola from Rayo Vallecano to manage it, left that club for Liverpool. Simultaneously, Brentford’s set-piece specialist Bernardo Cueva jumped to Chelsea. “In the end,” Edens said, “resources matter.”
But that evanescence is exactly why Forest are so compelling. They are a comet dashing across the sky, a unique phenomenon unlikely to soon come around again. As much as Marinakis will be discontented with anything short of world domination, those who have been close to the club for decades appreciate how special this season is already, whatever happens from here.
“We can’t affect how other teams play,” said Yates, who joined Forest’s youth setup 20 years ago, aged 7. “Success for us would be maintaining the level we’ve been at wherever that leads us, Champions League or Europe or who knows. If we keep performing the way we are, we will look back and say that this season will have been a success.”
Originally Written by: Bruce Schoenfeld
