Nottingham Forest's Ambitious Future Under New Coach
On the banks of the Trent, Nottingham Forest are trying to marry memory with ambition.
An Austrian coach with a taste for history-making has walked into a club that once treated silverware as a seasonal habit. Fresh from an extraordinary spell at Crystal Palace that brought the FA Cup, Community Shield and Europa Conference League to Selhurst Park, he now has a full pre-season to reshape Forest in his own image after succeeding Vitor Pereira.
This is not a quiet reset. It is being fuelled.
Elliot Anderson’s record-breaking £116 million move to Manchester City has ripped up Forest’s transfer ceiling and handed owner Evangelos Marinakis a war chest that will define the next chapter. Those close to the club know the pattern: the Greek shipping magnate changes managers often, but he does not hide when the bill arrives. He funds, he demands, he moves again if he must.
Forest have already felt the benefit of that restlessness. Four years back in the Premier League have brought deep runs in the Carabao Cup, FA Cup and Europa League – semi-finals that reminded the rest of the country that the club in red still has a taste for big nights. Competitive again, yes. Complete, no.
Because in Nottingham, the bar is not set by recent semi-finals. It is set by Brian Clough’s “Miracle Men”.
Clough built not one, but at least two great Forest sides, each good enough to stride across Europe. For those who lived it, the standard is brutal. For those who followed, it is a ghost that never quite leaves the stadium.
Des Walker knows both sides of that divide. He watched the European Cup-winning exploits, then became a pillar of Clough’s second great team, as Wembley turned into a second home in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cup finals, big days, trophies. Forest felt inevitable.
Since then? Just one major addition to the cabinet: the Championship play-off final victory that dragged the club back to the Premier League. For a club of Forest’s history, that gap gnaws.
Walker, speaking to GOAL in association with talkSPORT Bet Online Slots, believes the drought does not have to define the future.
“I’d like to think so, yeah,” the former defender said when asked if Forest can get back to lifting trophies. He kept circling back to one man: the chairman.
“I think with the chairman, he puts his money where his mouth is, to be fair to him. So, with the chairman, I think he wants to win something. I think he's got a big ego as well. So, he likes to be centre of attention. He wants to win something. He wants to get to Wembley and be dancing up and down on the pitch. So, it wouldn't surprise me.
“I think he will put his money where his mouth is. So, as long as we can harness that and build on what has been done in the last five years, then I see no reason why not.”
For Walker, the route back to glory does not necessarily run through a 38-game slog to the top of the Premier League. His mind drifts to something more explosive, more immediate.
He recalls a lesson from a dressing room long gone.
“Steve Hodge said something to me in, I think it was 1987, and I was a youngster, we talked about winning and he says, ‘anyone can win a cup’. He said, ‘the best team wins a league, anyone can win a cup’. And that year, we went and won two!”
That line has stayed with him. It shapes how he looks at Forest’s future.
“I've always had that in my mind. Anyone can win a cup. I look at the World Cup today, and you think, it's a cup. Anyone can win a cup. Of course, you need to perform, but anybody can perform on one single day, because you've only got to win the next game before you get to the next one. And we always had that, keep yourself in the hat.”
That is the challenge for the new manager and Marinakis: build a squad that can survive the Premier League grind, but also one that can catch fire for a month or two and refuse to go out. A team that, once it gets “in the hat”, stays there.
“Can you build a team to win the league? That's going to be difficult,” Walker admitted. “Can you win the FA Cup? Can you win the League Cup? Of course, you can. Could you get in one of the European competitions and win one of them? Of course, you can.”
Forest’s recent semi-finals suggest they are already edging back towards that territory. With a tactician who has just proved he can navigate knockout football on the continental stage, and an owner willing to bankroll another rebuild after the Anderson windfall, the pieces are there to push harder.
Walker’s focus, though, is not on balance sheets or tactical diagrams. It is on what it would mean when the final whistle blows on a day that really matters.
“So, it'd be nice to see the fans get rewarded. It'd be nice to see them win. We'd love it. It'd be great for the city. Great for everybody.”
The Miracle Men set the standard. The question now is whether this new Forest, armed with money, a proven cup specialist and an impatient owner, can finally carve out a miracle of their own.
