Even when Brian Clough roamed the narrow corridors of the City Ground like a colossus, Nottingham Forest were able to spend huge amounts of money in the transfer market with relatively little effect.
There was the £1 million for Justin Fashanu, perhaps the worst judgment of Clough’s partnership with Peter Taylor. Ian Wallace cost the same amount and made no difference. But there are no prizes for guessing what utter madness Clough is said to have done at the court of Evangelos Marinakis, the Greek shipping magnate from Forest, over the past three years.
Marinakis’ delegation of Forest’s transfer business to his son Marinakis Jnr – aka ‘Miltos’ – took Forest into a never-never land of mad judgment and mad spending.
As many as 43 players arrived for almost £300m over three transfer windows and on Monday there were consequences – a four-point deduction for breaching financial viability rules, which drops Forest into the zone relegation.
Some in Nottingham recently warned the club “not to be distracted by a sense of injustice”. There was nothing unfair about this decision.
Evangelos Marinakis, owner of Nottingham Forest, had delegated transfer activities to his son
No less than 43 players have been signed by Nottingham Forest since they achieved promotion.
The four-point deduction saw Nuno Espirito Santo’s side drop into the bottom three.
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Forest were certainly forced to buy many players in a hurry when they unexpectedly reached the Premier League with a squad full of loan players almost two years ago. They needed “ammunition,” Marinakis said at the time.
But that doesn’t explain what followed. There was the player signed with a broken leg who didn’t appear. There were four goaltenders hired in the same season, and two more were signed the following summer. There, both players were signed and then immediately loaned to Olympiacos.
Although some of the new players were a success – Morgan Gibbs-White, Taiwo Awoniyi and Danilo – many were poor and useless, including Jesse Lingard, Emmanuel Dennis and Jonjo Shelvey, whose contract Forest terminated when they realized that They had too many players absent. for rent.
When published yesterday, the 52-page independent commission report into the Forest hearing painted an unflattering picture of the club’s chaotic and opaque attempt to show it was trying to comply with profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). Forest had submitted no board meeting minutes and only a few emails or messages to the commission regarding the PSR. “Most of the communications were apparently oral,” the commission reported.
The same report revealed how Forest presented themselves as the unlucky ones in all this when they appeared to answer for a £34.5 million overspend over three years, two of which were in the Championship.
They had been promoted without benefit of the parachute bonuses that Fulham and Bournemouth still received. They had only managed to recoup the full £47.5m value of their golden homegrown talent, Brennan Johnson, when it was too late to set the transfer fee paid by Tottenham to make up for their losses .
The committee’s report also revealed that Forest’s strategy before the committee had been to target Everton. They had pointed out that the Goodison club were spending too long and exceeding a higher threshold in the Premier League than Forest in the Championship.
Morgan Gibbs-White had major success but several transfers proved unnecessary
Jesse Lingard (left) and Jonjo Shelvey (right) failed to make an impact at Forest
Forest had hoped to use the sale of Brennan Johnson to Tottenham as a mitigating factor
In a statement that will do little to restore harmony between the clubs, Forest also accused Everton of using the PSR system to avoid relegation last season. Forest “respectfully” told the commission panel that Everton had attempted to delay adjudication of its own case until November last year, initially denying the accusations and then prolonging the process.
The commission did not see things as Forest did. Its members, like many in football, considered the club’s transfer spending during that summer of promotion to be extraordinary. Net transfer spending in 2022-23, the panel highlighted, was £78.7m – or 123 per cent – higher than the average net transfer spend of all Premier League clubs (at exclusion of Chelsea). “The club’s number of incoming players was not only the highest in the Premier League, but was almost double that of the next club,” the report said.
The forest portrait of Everton’s greatest debauchery also went up in smoke. While the Goodison club’s overspending was just under £20million, Forest’s had exceeded £34.5million, the report concluded.
Everton were still digesting the Forest PSR report last night and not responding, but some at this club will be perplexed that Forest were hit with a four-point penalty, two points less than theirs and perhaps even fewer on appeal, when their overspending was much greater.
Everton entertain Forest on Saturday April 20. The conference room conversations that day could be very interesting.
Forest, who have seven days to appeal the deduction, gave no indication they intended to do so in their critical and scathing attack on the Premier League last night, which revealed they were unaware of the fact that they knew about the sustainability rules and signed them – and yet they still violated them. They got themselves into this mess.
Other clubs may view this unfavorably, as while Forest were spending money, many were limiting their spending to avoid breaking these rules and having to face consequences like this.
Forest targeted Everton during the defense but ultimately suffered greater losses than the Toffees.
Wolves’ concerns over PSR led the club to sell stars, including Ruben Neves, last summer.
Nottingham Forest have paid the price for their spending, but survival remains within reach.
PSR has become a mantra at Aston Villa and Newcastle United. Leicester City have arguably been relegated in a desperate attempt to comply – and yet they are still expected to be found in breach.
Wolves were so worried about breaking the rules for the year ending June 30, 2024 that they sold Ruben Neves, Nathan Collins and Matheus Nunes, allowed Raul Jimenez, Adama Traore and Joao Moutinho to leave and packed cheap signings to fill the gaps.
Forest’s executive chaos, meanwhile, reflects the way transfer business is handled. The club appointed a director of football, Ross Wilson, last April and have built an impressive recruitment and analytics team, led by Tom Stockwell, who had held a senior recruitment role at Southampton.
Yet while Wilson was setting up this structure, Marinakis turned to a former recruiting manager he had already fired, George Syrians, a data specialist now an “advisor to the board.” Firing an executive only to bring him back ten months later with another title doesn’t say much about Forest’s overall strategy – if there is one.
The real victims yesterday were the clubs whose Premier League prospects are yo-yoing in tandem with points deductions and appeals: Luton Town, Brentford and Crystal Palace.
The elephant in the room, of course, is Manchester City, who are sailing calmly. The club accused of lying and deliberate manipulation, through the creation of shell companies and paying people off the record – offenses they deny – are currently on their way to a fifth title in six years, having only not even been brought to justice for 115 alleged charges. violations of sustainability rules.
But there would be a grain of comfort if Forest could look inside themselves, search their souls, put their indignation aside and accept this decision.
The deduction is not catastrophic. Survival is a priority for them. They spent enormously, unsustainably, and paid the price. Let go now and start again. Let the madness stop.