It won’t have escaped your notice that Nottingham Forest have been rather busy on the transfer front this summer as the newly promoted club look to make a splash on their big return to the Premier League.
Indeed, Forest managed to set a new British record with the 21 signings they’ve made in the 2022 summer window. That beats the previous record of 19 by one club in a single transfer window, previously held by Scottish sides Dundee (summer of 2000) and Livingston (2001.)
Back in their glorious pomp, Forest won the European Cup twice consecutively under legendary manager Brian Clough in 1979 and 1980 — that’s two more European Cups than Manchester City, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur have ever managed — and were founder members of the Premier League in 1992-93. But fluctuating fortunes saw them ousted from the top flight in 1998-99. What followed was 23 long years of second and third-tier football — a painful span for one of the most decorated clubs in English football history.
Manager Steve Cooper took over in September 2021 with the team rock bottom of the table and somehow managed to propel the perennial sleeping giants back to the promised land by beating Huddersfield at Wembley in the Championship playoff final.
Yet his promotion-winning squad was quickly disassembled over the ensuing off-season as various loan deals came to an end, contracts expired and several surplus players were released. Important core players such as James Garner, Philip Zinckernagel, Max Lowe, Keinan Davis and Djed Spence returned to their respective parent clubs, while first-choice goalkeeper and playoff penalty hero Brice Samba was reluctantly allowed to return to Lens.
In total, around 20 players left the City Ground over the summer, leaving Cooper and his colleagues with the unenviable task of restocking their decimated squad. But little time was wasted, with Forest embarking on a rolling spree to sign a frankly absurd 21 players between June 25 and Sept. 1 thanks to Evangelos Marinakis, Forest’s majority owner.
To put that in context, that comfortably eclipses the incoming transfers at all of the Premier League’s Big Six clubs — Manchester City (5), Manchester United (6), Liverpool (4), Chelsea (9), Arsenal (5) and Spurs (8), as well as other major European sides like Barcelona (7), Real Madrid (2), Bayern Munich (6) and Paris Saint-Germain (7).
So exactly who makes up Forest’s vast troupe of summer signings? Let’s meet them all (in chronological order) …
