Forest hope to avoid paying the price for Al-hasawi £100m misadventure

John Percy details five years of chaos at the City Ground

After nearly five years of chronic mismanagement and instability, it is perhaps inevitable that Nottingham Forest are once again staring into the abyss of League One. From managerial sackings, contentious player sales, unpaid bills to failed eye tests, Forest’s decline under the bewildering regime of the Al-hasawi family has been slow and painful. Tomorrow the club face Ipswich Town with their Championship lives at stake.

Nobody can doubt the ambition of Kuwaiti owner Fawaz Al-hasawi, who has spent more than £100 million since taking charge in July 2012, but his reign cannot end quickly enough. He is set to be replaced by Olympiakos owner Evangelos Marinakis, who is in the final stages of a takeover, and, finally, most Forest supporters are hopeful of a brighter future.

Mark Warburton is charged with ensuring that future is in the second tier. He is the eighth permanent manager in Al-hasawi’s time and confronts a situation where Forest are separated by one goal from Blackburn in the bottom three, with the east Lancashire side at Brentford.

“The players know what is at stake and relegation harms everyone. Nobody wants that on their CV and we know what we have to do,” said Warburton. “It’s a high-pressure situation and we have to view it as a positive challenge.”

Some say relegation would be karma. If you speak to officials at other clubs over the past four years about how Forest operate, the response usually varies from incredulity to sadness over how such an iconic club is being treated. Staff numbers are woefully low and Al-hasawi has not attended a game for months. Winding-up orders and unpaid tax bills have been the norm.

Alarm bells were ringing early, after an Al-hasawi aide asked the kit-man why the club were overspending on footballs when Asda sold them for £5. There was an incident before a game at Brighton when, paying for the team’s hotel, staff were stunned to discover the club’s credit card was maxed out.

Sean O’driscoll was sacked on Boxing Day 2012 hours after a 4-2 victory over Leeds and it has arguably been downhill ever since.

Perhaps the most bizarre episode, and there have been many, came during the January transfer window in 2013 when Forest moved to sign George Boyd, then of Peterborough. Take it away, Barry Fry. “I’ve been in the game 56 years and never known anything like it. We’d agreed a £350,000 fee for them to take him on loan with a guarantee of £2.5 million if they wanted him,” said Peterborough’s director of football this week.

“I got a call saying he’d done the medical but then he had to go to Mansfield for an eye test. About 9.45pm we got a call from the agent saying ‘Boydy’ is upset and the deal

is off because he’d failed the eye test. The owner wouldn’t sanction it. Alex Mcleish came on to apologise and we later found out it was the manager who replaced him a few weeks later, Billy Davies, who didn’t want Boyd. That was heartbreaking.”

The second coming of Davies was a sinister period in Forest history and he remains the longest-serving manager of the Al-hasawi reign at 13 months.

Not even the return of Stuart Pearce in 2014 could remove the storm clouds. The presence of the club’s former captain initially generated a tidal wave of optimism and he came accompanied by Paul Faulkner, previously Aston Villa’s chief executive.

Forest started the season by going 11 league games unbeaten – but it soon began to untangle and go awry. Pearce was sacked following a 1-0 defeat by Millwall in February 2015 and Faulkner departed 24 hours later.

Speaking for the first time about his five-month tenure, Faulkner said: “Sadly the club’s ownership showed no appetite to put the proper structures in place to run Forest in a calm and stable way. I found no support or desire to consider simple changes that were designed to improve how the club was operating.

“Ultimately an owner can run a club however they best see fit but over the past four years at Forest that has been to the detriment of all involved. Hopefully the team can get a result on Sunday so the club has another chance to genuinely rebuild.”

The last two years under Dougie Freedman and Philippe Montanier have been plagued by underachievement. The sale of young Scotland winger Oliver Burke to RB Leipzig last August was a blow. The aborted takeover by American investor John Jay Moores in January, after months of talks, undoubtedly transmitted to the field and, since being appointed in March, Warburton has struggled to guide Forest out of trouble.

If they do survive, there is a chance of recovery. Despite Marinakis’s controversial reputation in Greece, he has a sound business plan and the Football League is satisfied that he is “fit and proper”. Forest’s academy is also outstanding and in Warburton they have a progressive manager who has proved he can succeed in the Championship.

But tomorrow’s game promises to be excruciating, as Forest attempt to avoid dropping into League One for the first time since 2008.

You do not need an eye test to see this has been coming for years.