While established heavy hitters Liverpool and Arsenal are the big names leading the way in the Premier League this season, there is a third, unexpected contender in the 2024-25 title race — Nottingham Forest.
Nuno Espirito Santo’s side narrowly staved off relegation last term but a miraculous surge in form and results this season has got them hurtling into the new year in fearsome fettle and staking a decent claim as underdogs in the hunt for the championship.
Forest brushed aside Nuno’s former side Wolverhampton Wanderers 3-0 on Monday to register their sixth league win on the bounce and go level with second-placed Arsenal on points and six behind leaders Liverpool with more than half of the campaign played. Considering they were only promoted to the Premier League in 2022, and marked their first season back in the top flight with a seemingly chaotic recruitment that saw 30 players signed across two transfer windows, it’s a remarkable turnaround.
Of course, there is a recent precedent for a team winning the Premier League against all the odds, with Forest’s East Midlands neighbours Leicester City maintaining their irrepressible form throughout the 2015-16 season to clinch one of the most unlikely titles in history.
With Forest not in league action until they host Liverpool at the City Ground next Tuesday, having already beaten Arne Slot’s side at Anfield, this feels like as good a juncture as any to assess the plausibility of their title credentials.
Nottingham Forest’s flying form
After putting three unanswered goals past Wolves at Molineux, Forest extended their Premier League winning streak to six straight games. Since the start of December they have also beaten Manchester United, Aston Villa, Brentford, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton. This is the first time Forest have won six consecutive top-flight league games since the 1966-67 season, when they also mounted a title challenge in the then First Division only to be pipped to the trophy by Manchester United.
Forest have now won 10 of their last 13 Premier League outings and have been firmly ensconced inside the top four since their 2-1 victory over Villa on Dec. 14. With 40 points earned from their first 20 games, Forest are already eight points better off than their final points tally from last season, when Nuno’s side finished 17th with 32 points from 38 games.
Of the 70 teams to have accrued 40 points or more from their opening 20 games of a Premier League season, only four have failed to finish inside the top four come the end of the campaign. That’s right, Forest fans: UEFA Champions League qualification is as good as guaranteed. European football may well be returning to the City Ground for the first time since 1995-96.
Who are Forest’s key players?
While perhaps not quite on par with Forest’s legendary vintage of the late 1970s, when the club won their only league title as well as back-to-back European Cups, Nuno’s crop of players have been performing at an incredibly consistent level this season.
Arguably the star man has been 33-year-old striker Chris Wood, who has rolled back the years and weighed in with crucial goals. Wood is on fire at the moment with 12 Premier League goals in 20 games. He is already only two goals off equalling his best haul for a season in the top flight (14), which he has mustered on two occasions — first with Burnley in 2019-20 and most recently with Forest in 2023-24.
The New Zealand international has excelled as a physical, penalty box poacher, forming the perfect focal point in front of Anthony Elanga, Morgan Gibbs-White and Callum Hudson-Odoi. That trio have all hit peak form at the same time, contributing nine league goals and nine assists between them.
With only 29 goals scored (the lowest in the top half of the table), the key aspect of Forest’s form this season has been their rock-solid defensive unit. Centre-back pairing Murillo and Nikola Milenkovic providing the steel while goalkeeper Matz Sels has proven his shot-stopping abilities on numerous occasions.
The 3-0 win over Wolves was Forest’s fourth clean sheet in a row and ninth overall in the league this season, which is more than any other team. It is also the first time that the Reds have successfully prevented their opponents from scoring in four consecutive top-flight games since March 1992.
Of all those aforementioned players, Gibbs-White is the only one who arrived in that notorious initial splurge of signings. The others have all arrived since the summer of 2023, with Milenkovic the most recent recruit having joined from Fiorentina last summer.
Can Nuno be Forest’s Ranieri?
It’s fair to say that Nuno was something of an “unfancied” appointment when he took over at Forest in December 2023, despite the job he had done taking Wolves up to the Premier League and establishing them in the top flight.
Prior to arriving at the City Ground, the Portuguese coach had been fired from his previous Premier League job at Tottenham after just three disastrous months and 17 games in charge. He was then out of the game entirely for eight months before landing a job in Saudi Arabia with Al Ittihad in July 2022. Nuno won the 2022 Saudi Super Cup and then delivered Al Ittihad’s first league title in 14 years before being sacked in November 2023.
He was then hired by Forest the following month in the wake of Steve Cooper’s dismissal, and made their Premier League survival mathematically certain on the final day of the season despite them being deducted four points for breaching the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules. After finishing 17th in 2023-24 and navigating his new team through off-field turmoil, Nuno has somehow managed to transform a piecemeal squad into a cohesive unit in the space of 18 months.
There is a parallel with Claudio Ranieri’s reign at Leicester City, which came after the famously itinerant coach had suffered a truly disastrous stint as manager of the Greece national team. The Italian lasted just four months and four games in charge of Greece, who stumbled to one draw and three defeats under his watch.
A humiliating 1-0 defeat in a Euro 2016 qualifier against the Faroe Islands in November 2014 brought everything to a premature end. Ranieri later openly described his decision to take the Greece job as a “mistake” after being tasked with rebuilding the fortunes of the national team in the space of just 12 days and three coaching sessions.
The following year, Ranieri took over at Leicester, who had been battling relegation the previous season. However, at the end of his first season at the King Power Stadium, he had led them to an improbable Premier League title triumph that shocked the world.
Are Forest on track to “do a Leicester?”
With 20 games of the 2015-16 season played, Leicester were in second place with 40 points on the board; they went on to win the league with 81 points, a vast 10-point gap ahead of runners-up Arsenal in the final standings.
It will no doubt make enticing reading for Forest fans that their side are also 40 points to the good after 20 games played. They are only third in the table instead of second because of Arsenal’s superior goal difference.
Leicester’s next five games were: Tottenham (A), Aston Villa (A), Stoke City (H), Manchester City (A), Arsenal (A). They took 13 points from 15 available from that run of fixtures.
Forest have a run which, on paper, would seem slightly more favourable over their next five league games: Liverpool (H), Southampton (H), Bournemouth (A), Brighton & Hove Albion, (H), Fulham (A). So it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Nuno’s side could stay on track or at least keep pace with Leicester’s points total through that run.
Of course, there is still a lot of football to be played, and as Forest have proven countless times in the past, things could go dramatically wrong from here. But still, there is reason to dream at the City Ground — and that hasn’t happened for the longest time.
What are the odds?
Leicester City were famously cited as +500000 (5,000 to 1) outsiders to win the Premier League ahead of the 2015-16 season before going on to do exactly that. While their miraculous title triumph means the bookies may never again offer such long odds, Forest were understandably not given much chances of winning the league having only just staved off the drop to the Championship last term.
According to ESPN BET, the Reds were rank outsiders at +100000 (1,000 to 1) to win the Premier League title at the start of the season. They also commanded +10000 (100 to 1) odds of to finish in the top four and qualify for the Champions League, +8000 (80 to 1) to finish in the top six and secure some kind of European qualification, +800 (8 to 1) to finish in the top half of the table, at +175 (1.75 to 1) they were among the favourites to be relegated. What a difference six months makes.
What is Forest’s pedigree when it comes to title races?
Forest do have experience when it comes to mounting title races — though it must be said that none of it is particularly recent.
Harking back to the last time they won six straight top-flight games, Forest staged one of their first major title challenges as they kept the pressure on Manchester United throughout the 1966-67 season in the old First Division. However, a chastening 2-1 defeat to Southampton in their penultimate game ended their hopes of lifting the trophy.
There are a handful of other examples of Forest keeping pace with the league leaders before dropping away, and that is perhaps why the First Division championship won under legendary manager Brian Clough in 1977-78 remains the only top-flight title won during the club’s 160-year history.
Clough guided Forest back to the top tier as Second Division champions in 1976-77 and then astonishingly kicked on to win the First Division title the following season, going unbeaten during the second half of the campaign to finish seven points clear of Liverpool at the top. Clough’s miracle men then won back-to-back European Cups in 1978-79 and 1979-80 with a pair of 1-0 wins over Malmö and Hamburg SV during a wonderful flourish of domestic and continental success.
