Forest pay price for entering never-never land of lunatic judgment and wild outlay on poor players
EVEN when Brian Clough walked the City Ground’s narrow corridors like a colossus, Nottingham Forest were capable of blowing a hell of a lot of money in the transfer market to relatively little effect.
There was the £1million for Justin Fashanu, perhaps the worst judgment call of Clough’s partnership with Peter Taylor. Ian Wallace cost the same sum and made no more difference. But there are no prizes for guessing what Clough would have made of the unmitigated madness in the court of Evangelos Marinakis, Forest’s Greek shipping magnate owner, these past three years.
Marinakis’s delegation of Forest’s transfer business to his son Marinakis Jnr — aka ‘Miltos’ — has taken Forest into a nevernever land of lunatic judgment and wild outlay.
No fewer than 43 players have arrived for close to £250m across three transfer windows and yesterday there were consequences — a four-point deduction for a breach of financial sustainability rules, which drops Forest into the relegation zone.
Some in Nottingham have recently cautioned the club about ‘not getting distracted by a sense of injustice’. There was nothing unjust about this decision.
Forest were certainly forced to buy a lot of players in a hurry when they unexpectedly reached the Premier League with a team composed of many loanees, nearly two years ago. They needed ‘ammunition’, Marinakis said at the time.
But that didn’t account for what followed. There was the player signed with a broken leg who hasn’t made an appearance. There were the four goalkeepers hired in the same season, with an additional two joining the following summer. There were the two players signed and then immediately loaned to Olympiacos.
Though some of the new players were a success — Morgan GibbsWhite, Taiwo Awoniyi and Danilo — many were poor and unnecessary, including Jesse Lingard, Emmanuel Dennis and Jonjo Shelvey, whose contract Forest terminated when they realised that they had too many players out on loan.
When it dropped yesterday, the 52-page independent commission report of the Forest hearing painted an unflattering picture of the club’s chaotic and opaque attempt to prove they were trying to comply with the profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). Forest had submitted no board meeting minutes and only a few emails or messages to the commission, relating to PSR. ‘Most communications were apparently oral,’ the commission reported.
The same report revealed how
Forest had painted themselves as the unfortunates in all of this when they appeared to answer for a £34.5m overspend over three years, two of them in the Championship.
They had been promoted without the benefit of the parachute payments that Fulham and Bournemouth were still receiving. They had only managed to recoup the full £47.5m value of their golden home-grown talent, Brennan Johnson, when it was too late to set the transfer fee Tottenham paid against their losses.
THE report also revealed Forest’s strategy in front of the commission had been to take aim at Everton. They had pointed out that the Goodison club had been overspending for longer than them and exceeded a higher threshold in the Premier League than Forest had in the Championship.
In a submission which will do little to bring harmony between the clubs, Forest also accused Everton of playing the system to avoid relegation last season.
Forest ‘respectfully’ told the commission panel that Everton had attempted to delay judgment on their own case until November last year, by initially denying charges and then prolonging the process.
The commission did not see things Forest’s way. Its members, like many people in football, considered the club’s transfer outlay in that promotion summer to be extraordinary. The net transfer spending in 2022-23, the panel pointed out, was £78.7m — or 123 per cent — higher than the average net transfer spending of all Premier League clubs (excluding
Chelsea). ‘The club’s incoming number of players was not only the highest in the Premier League but nearly double the next-highest club,’ the report found.
Forest’s portrait of Everton’s greater profligacy rather went up in smoke, too. While the Toffees’ overspend was a little less than £20m, Forest’s had gone £34.5m beyond, the report concluded.
Everton were still digesting the Forest PSR report last night and making no response, but some at that club will feel bemusement that Forest have been hit with a four-point penalty, two points less than their own and perhaps less still on appeal, when their overspend was far greater.
Everton entertain Forest on Saturday, April 20. Boardroom conversations that day may be very interesting.
Forest, who have seven days to appeal the deduction, gave no indication of their intent to do so in their trenchantly critical attack on the Premier League last night, which revealed no sense of awareness that they knew the sustainability rules, signed up to them — and yet still breached them. They got themselves into this mess.
Other clubs may take a dim view of that, because as Forest splashed the cash, many were reining in their spending to avoid breaching those rules and having to face up to consequences such as this.
PSR has become a mantra at Aston Villa and Newcastle United.