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.
That summer, the club signed 22 new players, the equivalent of two entire teams from goalkeeper to striker, setting a Football Association record. The $185 million spent in three months was more money than in the entire previous history of the club taken together. The season had barely begun when head of recruitment George Syrianos and scouting director Andy Scott, who had made those transfers, were fired by Marinakis. In January, Filippo Giraldi, Syrianos' replacement, brought in six more new players. By April, with the club in the relegation zone, Giraldi was gone too. Results, Marinakis warned, needed to "improve immediately."
They did, too: Forest stayed up that season by beating Arsenal at home on the penultimate weekend. To celebrate, perhaps, Marinakis and Ross Wilson, who was hired to replace Giraldi as sporting director, bought the contracts of 13 more players. The total spend amounted to some $240 million on 34 signings over 18 months. The spree seems extreme, and Forest a poor man's Chelsea, but amid the flops and miscalculations was some real quality. Most of the current club was acquired during those windows.
Forest stayed up again last season under new manager Nuno Espirito Santo despite a four-point deduction for breaching profit and sustainability rules with all those signings. And that, apparently, set the stage. "Look, we believed in ourselves last season," striker Chris Wood said. "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 are far from the Premier League's most entertaining club. In stark contrast to the elaborate ball-control schemes of the other clubs at the top of the table, they play almost as though they're a man down, swapping possession for territory, letting the time tick by, waiting to exploit a lapse. 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 all that success an optical illusion? The week before the Brighton game, they were thrashed 5-0 at Bournemouth. And Brighton was on a roll; they'd lost only once since the middle of December. Yet they played into Espirito Santo's hands, fielding five attackers and only one true midfielder and deploying their defense daringly high. 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 put the game away, and then they tacked on two more as a coda after the 89th minute. And conceded nothing.
The researchers scurried to find the last time Forest had won a game in England's top flight by such a margin. Soon they had it: back before the Premier League, a 7-0 takedown of Chelsea on April 20, 1991. Clough had been the manager. One of the old-timers in the press room said it seemed like a good omen.
Just after noon on transfer deadline day earlier this month, sporting director Wilson was spending some of the window's final hours giving a visitor a leisurely tour of the renovated training grounds.
Uncharacteristically, Forest had brought in only a single player, the young Reading defender Tyler Bindon -- and he was heading right back to Reading on loan after his physical. As Wilson walked through the training room, he spotted Bindon on an examination table and called out a cheery hello. He could be relaxed, he said, because his business was done. That meant keeping Forest's best players throughout the January window: only James Ward-Prowse departed, recalled from his loan by West Ham.
For other clubs on the edge of the Premier League's upper echelon, Brighton and Brentford and Bournemouth and even Aston Villa, the template for success is to identify and nurture young talent, then move that talent on at a profit to finance the next round of acquisitions. "That, in turn, helps us to bridge the gap between the revenues we can generate from the match day operations and TV rights, and what the bigger clubs can do," said Paul Barber, Brighton's chief executive.
Marinakis is having none of that. His vision of Nottingham Forest is that of a two-time European Cup winner. (It should be noted that just two Premier League clubs, Liverpool and Manchester United, have been champions of Europe more often.) He fully expects Forest to regain their place among English football's elite.
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."