It is a strange, unsettling feeling to have Nottingham Forest as your team and think that, for the first time in the club’s 158-year history, the league table might have an asterisk against our name at the end of the season.
What that asterisk will say, we don’t know yet. That will become clearer in April once the punishment is announced and we get a better idea about the damage it could cause to Forest’s position in the Premier League.
All that can be said with absolute certainty is that the announcement about Forest breaching Profitability and Sustainability rules (PSR) will be bombshell news for all the people inside the City Ground who had been assured by the chairman-turned-director, Nicholas Randall, that the club would never be in this position.
The players, the coaching staff and the manager, Nuno Espirito Santo, will be taking in the news that Forest, currently 15th, could be torpedoed into the relegation places. Fans will be worrying. Mums and dads will be trying to explain to kids what PSR means and, no, that it was never something they mentioned when they were introducing them to this daft, infuriating sport. It is not a conversation any parent wants to have.
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But it is also not a conversation that ought to have been necessary if the relevant people at the top of the club had been smarter, better, more strategic, less impetuous because the bottom line here is that they could have avoided all this: the risk-taking, the PSR breach, the strong likelihood of points being taken away.
Not everyone seems to agree with that sentiment judging by the responses on social media if anybody, for example, dares to question whether Miltiadis Marinakis, the 24-year-old son of the owner, is the right person to have in charge of transfers.
Many fans online seem to regard even the most routine questions as personal attacks. Journalists are dismissed as stirrers and malcontents. It is all an agenda, goes the cry. And today, boy, some people have been spectacularly shown up.
So let’s walk through this again for the umpteenth time and, in analysing the Evangelos Marinakis empire, accept there can be both good and bad and that it is not treachery to be grateful for his money while also concluding that he could have taken much better care of it.
Yes, it is wonderful to have an owner who is ambitious in the extreme. Yes, the good outweighs the bad, even if some ex-managers might argue it can be a close-run thing sometimes. And yes, it has been a heck of a ride since the former manager, Steve Cooper, led the club from bottom of the Championship to an almost implausible promotion.
Nottingham Forest are 15th in the Premier League table (Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)
Today, though, it is tempting to wonder whether Marinakis and his son will ever fully meet their ambitions for Forest if they adopt the same attitude they have at Olympiacos, their Greek club, and prefer to go by their own rules.
Today, it becomes strikingly obvious why so many Forest fans have felt frustrated that there does not appear to be a supporters’ organisation, barring the good people at Forza Garibaldi, with the wit or gumption to hold the club to account in any way whatsoever.
More than anything, the penny might have dropped that unquestioning attitudes have been a lot more damaging to the good ship Nottingham Forest than those of us who tried to point out that a successful club needs more than just a twice-a-year transfer splurge. It needs vision, strategy, joined-up thinking. It needs an understanding, in Forest’s case, that the progress and positivity is undermined too often by a number of avoidable mistakes and that those mistakes can have consequences.
It is not a straightforward subject because, at the heart of everything, it boils down to Marinakis’ ambitions to take the club up the league and his refusal to believe that a finish of, say, 13th to 16th, is adequate this season.
Ask any Forest fan who experienced the club’s 23 years outside the top division and they will all agree the blitz of signings since promotion — 29 last season, 13 halfway through this — has been preferable to the transfer embargoes under previous owner Fawaz Al Hasawi or, before that, the financial restrictions of the Nigel Doughty regime.
And, let’s be honest, most fans want, or even crave, their clubs to spend money. The bigger the fee, the more excitement. “Here we go,” and all that razzamatazz. It has become a sport in itself, one in which Miltiadis has become an enthusiastic participant.
Nobody objected, therefore, when Jesse Lingard arrived on the highest salary of any Forest player in history. Very few fans raised objections — because why would they? — when Miltiadis announced signing after signing and instructed Forest that his own social media account, not the club’s website, should go first with Lingard’s announcement.
It was new, exciting, and part of a wider story that involved Marinakis Sr telling supporters to prepare for trophies. Forest spent more in the summer of 2022 than Real Madrid, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain. A new signing arrived, on average, every four days. “Thirty signings, who gives a f***?” the fans sung. Now we have the answer — the Premier League — questions have to be asked about the people who assured us they had never lost sight of the PSR limits, what was permissible and what was not.
Many of the articles you will read in the coming days and weeks will focus on Brennan Johnson’s transfer to Tottenham Hotspur, on the basis that it will form a large part of Forest’s mitigation.
If Johnson had been sold at the start of summer, there would have been no problem, but that would have meant accepting around £30million ($38m) from Brentford, whom he did not want to join, whereas Spurs ended up paying £47.5m on transfer deadline day, September 1. Forest held out for the better deal and that was the “near miss” that took the club past the PSR deadline of June 30.
Many people inside the City Ground believe the entire PSR system should be reconsidered. Why, they ask, should a club in Forest’s position be stopped from splashing their cash? What kind of closed shop is this? And they have a point: the rules seem particularly stacked against promoted teams, especially one in Forest’s case that had barely half a side when they came up because of a previous dependency on loan players.
Nor should anyone expect Forest to become the first team in the history of the sport to get every transfer right. It just doesn’t happen that way. Some work out, others less so. The secret is trying to get more like Stan Collymore and fewer of Robert Rosario, if you know your history.
Marinakis, for example, has unearthed a gem in Murillo since a contact tipped him off that there was a young Brazilian centre-half, available for around £15m from Corinthians, who would not look out of place in Manchester City’s defence. Danilo, another Brazilian, could end up making the club a lot of money. Morgan Gibbs-White, one of Forest’s more expensive signings, is a joy to watch.
Ultimately, though, you can get a decent idea of how Forest operate from the fact they finished the last transfer window with four right-backs and eight centre-backs. Everything can feel very jumbled sometimes. Randall is previously on record as saying that Forest, under Marinakis, have been guilty at times of “short-termism”.
Others will recall that Forest began their first season back in the top division with a blank space on the players’ shirts because Marinakis was dissatisfied with the offers proposed by potential sponsors and rejected them all. That money, on reflection, could have been extremely useful, running into millions of pounds.
There is the story of Omar Richards, who joined from Bayern Munich without anybody realising he had a fractured leg. Somehow, Richards passed a medical he underwent in Greece. He cost £8.5m and, 18 months on, has not played a single minute for the club.
We could go on. Harry Arter, for example, is still on the payroll, more than three years after his last game. Arter’s contract earns him £40,000 a week and the tragicomedy is that an extra year was triggered automatically, including bonuses, after promotion. He is not the reason Forest have fallen foul of PSR. He is, however, a symbol of the club’s excess, earning £6m in wages since his last involvement.
Harry Arter has not played for Nottingham Forest since January 2021 but is on a lucrative contract (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Or just consider how much money Forest have thrown at trying to find an elite goalkeeper since the strange and unsatisfactory parting of the ways with Brice Samba, last seen at French club Lens being nominated for the Yashin trophy, the Ballon d’Or award for the world’s best No 1.
All the while, Forest’s supporters were enjoying the ride so much they had no real appetite to question whether everything was in hand. Who can blame them for wanting to embrace happier times? Most fans just want to assume their club is run in a way that avoids these dramas. In Forest’s case, they were assured, more than once, that the club had made it a priority not to exceed the PSR limits.
For Randall, that represents a personal embarrassment. PSR was supposed to be his area of expertise, along with overseeing the building of a new stand, and both subjects have become an ordeal for the club. “We have always complied with PSR,” Randall, a KC, said a while back, “and we will continue to do so. That’s always been a part of our philosophy.”
What is not clear is whether this might affect his position. Randall was removed as chairman earlier this season after displeasing Marinakis over a number of unrelated matters. For a while, he was not even given a seat in the boardroom before matches.
He was kept on as a non-executive director, primarily because of his apparent knowledge of PSR and the relationships he had formed with the Premier League, but the latest developments reflect badly on him. Nick De Marco KC has been brought in to oversee Forest’s case. The overall impression is that various people within the Marinakis regime have lost faith in Randall.
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At the same time, it was never Randall signing off the transfers, identifying the players or agreeing their salaries. That, ultimately, was Marinakis and it will be interesting to see the owner’s reaction. Does he come out swinging or does he accept responsibility? Can he understand why some people with knowledge of the situation think it is a problem for Forest that nobody at the club, other than himself, has the authority to rein in Miltiadis?
By the time Forest signed Chris Wood and Jonjo Shelvey from Newcastle United last January, they knew the numbers contained all sorts of risks. They went ahead and did it anyway.
Wood signed on loan with a clause in his contract that triggered a £15m deal, on £100,000 a week, as soon as he was named in the matchday squad three times. Shelvey was given a two-and-a-half year contract on roughly £75,000 a week and, within St James’ Park, the two transfers created something bordering on amazement. Put bluntly, they could not believe Forest thought it was good business.
Filippo Giraldi, then Forest’s sporting director, lost his job as a result, in part, of being the man who recommended the two players.
George Syrianos, the former head of recruitment, had been sacked because Forest’s hierarchy were not impressed by one of his picks, Taiwo Awoniyi, who cost £17.5m from Union Berlin. That was two months into the 2022-23 season. When Awoniyi established himself as a key player, Forest went back to Syrianos, apologised and offered him a consultancy role.
And now? It is a waiting game, for the most part, with a cloud hanging over Forest’s season. Marinakis has not said anything, neither has his son, nor has Randall.
Nuno will hold a news conference on Tuesday and you have to feel sorry for him, not even four weeks into the job, that it is the manager, not the people above him, who has to explain why the Premier League table might soon have an asterisk at the end of Nottingham Forest’s name.
(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)