NOTTINGHAM, England — “Surprised?” said John O’Hare, who played 101 games for Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “I would say so. Astonished.”
O’Hare was walking past the grandstand at City Ground, where Forest — who currently sit third in the Premier League, behind only Liverpool and Arsenal — would play Brighton that afternoon. Behind him, reminders of the club’s past glory under the charismatic but contentious Brian Clough were on display, lettered in white against the red façade. “Champions of Europe 1979,” one of them read, and “Champions of Europe 1980,” the other. O’Hare played on those European Cup teams. A decade later, at the end of Clough’s tenure, Forest advanced to two domestic cup finals; then they went underwater.
O’Hare remains a presence, attending every home game. Like nearly everyone else, he didn’t see this coming. Asked if he would have been content with a midtable finish this season, which began with only the three newly promoted clubs more likely to be relegated, according to the betting odds, he acknowledged it with a chuckle. It’s an easy question. Is there anyone who wouldn’t have been?
Instead, Nottingham Forest are challenging for a top-four finish and a place in next season’s Champions League — and even, since this whole thing seems like a fantasy anyway, becoming the only club outside the Premier League’s Big Six besides Leicester City in 2016 to win the title in the 21st century.
The only ones who aren’t perplexed by this are those making it happen. “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.”
Only a few months ago, Brighton and Brentford, whose owners are professional gamblers with a deep understanding of data analysis, were everyone’s examples of how financially challenged upstarts could compete against Manchester City and Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham, the six clubs that, for reasons of history but mostly revenue, were invited to join the prospective Super League in 2021.
But how to explain Nottingham Forest? Owned by the Cretan billionaire Evangelos Marinakis, a colorful character who was charged with both match fixing and drug smuggling by Greek prosecutors only to be acquitted of both, Forest were promoted back into England’s top tier in 2022. Almost immediately, they embarked on a comically chaotic journey.
Accordingly, overtures for Morgan Gibbs-White and Murillo, two crucial members of the current squad, were rebuffed 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, whose other holdings include the Greek club Olympiakos, which won last season’s Europa Conference League, is a man of massive ambition. To his credit, he has made substantial changes to Forest off the field. The three buildings that constitute the training ground still look from the outside like they might have when Clough was around, but now they have baristas serving coffee and new equipment everywhere. “The room we’re sitting in wasn’t here seven months ago,” Wilson said at one point. “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.”
By some accounts, Espirito Santo also has had something of a makeover. At Wolves –where he managed from 2017 to 2021, a tenure that included consecutive seventh-place finishes — he took little interest in analytics. (One club analyst at the time said he was only able to 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 less rigid idea of how to win football matches. That includes using data, Wilson emphasizes, though Nuno still runs his club with the same comfortable certitude. “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 has hardly changed even though instead of a relegation battle, he has European qualification in his sights. “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 is made up of reclamation projects. Gibbs-White never fulfilled his potential at Wolves. Anthony Elanga was cast off by Manchester United. Wood signed on after two dismal seasons at Newcastle; Forest is, preposterously enough, 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 such squad turnover a couple of years ago, Espirito Santo has since curated a small, extremely tight squad, then allowed the players to grow together. And for all his bluster, Marinakis has imbued the entire organization with a sense of mission. “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 making a great environment for us to work in. And then we’ve got to do it on the pitch.”
That means handling Fulham, Newcastle, Arsenal and Manchester City in the next four fixtures. But in this season of relative equality 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 contending, the first that Manchester City wasn’t primed to win the league, accumulate 100 points, or both since Pep Guardiola arrived in 2016-17. 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.”
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 came to 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.”
