What was going through Jose Mourinho’s mind, on that summer’s day in 1996, when he arrived in a city that knows a thing or two about football miracles?
He would have turned left out of Nottingham railway station and past the parade of shops where Terry Taylor, with a walrus moustache and an Aladdin’s cave of football memorabilia, used to run Programme World.
As Mourinho headed through the underpass into The Meadows, he might have been unaware he was entering an inner-city housing estate that had a formidable reputation in those days (even the Rottweilers, to borrow the old joke, went round in twos).
“I was curious about the city,” Mourinho explained in the foreword to I Believe in Miracles, the book telling the story of Nottingham Forest’s back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980. “I had never been to Nottingham before, but I had grown up as a kid hearing all the stories of Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. And more than anything, I knew about Brian Clough and Nottingham Forest.”
Mourinho was 33, part of Bobby Robson’s backroom staff at Barcelona, when he arrived in the Midlands to find out about the city where Clough had worked his precious magic. It was long before Hurricane Jose blew into the Premier League. And that meant the future Special One, visiting England for Euro 96, could get the train from London to Nottingham without anyone giving him a second look.
The view across the Trent to the City Ground (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
So he headed past the Poets Corner pub in the heart of the ‘Medders’ (if you know the Nottingham accent), past the launderette, through the shopping precinct and the tightly packed streets of unpretentious, 1970s Radburn design housing.
On the other side of the canal, he may have seen the floodlights of Meadow Lane, home of Notts County, where one of the stalwarts, Dave McVay, referred to Forest as “the evil slime”.
And then, completely unrecognised, Mourinho came out of the housing estate to cross Trent Bridge and take in the view of the stadium where Clough had transformed an unfashionable, unheralded side into the kings of Europe.
“Nobody knew me at the time, so it was OK,” explained Mourinho, with typical modesty. “It was a long time before I was thinking about winning European Cups myself. I walked all the way and when I saw the stadium I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? This club won the European Cup? Twice?’”
To answer your questions, Jose, the answer was yes on all fronts.
It is true that the City Ground is no San Siro or Camp Nou. The current capacity is just over 30,000 and, stepping back in time, the old Trent End terrace never had the dimensions of Liverpool’s Kop or Arsenal’s North Bank. The Trent End was more a sufferer of small-man syndrome: loud, full of itself, often aggressive.
The City Ground still has something special, though, especially when the volume is cranked up, the floodlights are on and the reflection shimmers off the River Trent. “The place oozes football soul,” said Steve Cooper, the former manager.
And here’s the thing: Nottingham, once again, is daring to dream. Nuno Espirito Santo’s team are the season’s surprise package, targeting Champions League qualification and happily ticking off all sorts of new adventures: their first win at Liverpool since 1969, their first at Manchester United since 1994, their first at Everton since 1999 and their first ‘double’ on Merseyside since 1898-99, when the steamboat Empress sailed down the Trent to mark the opening of the City Ground.
Forest are third in the Premier League (behind second-placed Arsenal only on goal difference) and it can feel like a trick of the imagination that a team with 40 points from 20 games have spent the previous two seasons trying to avoid the chilly fingers of relegation closing round their neck. Liverpool, the league leaders, are the opponents on Tuesday. And, with all the success, there comes a level of attention that has not been seen on Trentside for decades.
Forest’s Tony Woodcock and Larry Lloyd with the European Cup in 1979 (Monte Fresco/Getty Images)
“It’s unexpected to see Forest in this position in the Premier League,” says Damien Degorre, visiting Nottingham as the correspondent for L’Equipe, the French sports newspaper. “We always write about Manchester City, Arsenal, (Pep) Guardiola, (Erling) Haaland, Arsenal, Chelsea, City, Guardiola… it’s time to change and write about another team.”
Degorre has flown in from Paris to learn more about the city where Ibuprofen was invented and whether it is true that it is perfectly normal in the local dialect to be called “duck”, or even “duckie”, as a form of endearment (dead right it is, duck).
A social media video has gone viral, meanwhile, that is causing much amusement for the regulars at the Waterside, Larwood & Voce, the Trent Navigation, Trent Bridge Inn, Lady Bay, Stratford Haven, the William Gunn, the Embankment and all the other pubs around the stadium.
It is a feast of told-you-so triumphalism, a smorgasbord of schadenfreude, 103 glorious seconds of one-upmanship, and it starts with Gary Lineker announcing his relegation picks before the season began. “It’s them or Leicester,” says the BBC Match of the Day host. “But anyway, I’m going for Forest to go down.”
Jamie Carragher is next. He, too, thinks Forest have their toes tagged for the relegation morgue. Then we move on to the talkSPORT crew and some enthusiastic YouTubers who, without wishing to be cruel, might not fully understand what Clough meant when he talked about the “know-nowts” of his time.
“Forest have spent £40million (sic) on Elliot Anderson,” announces one, to sniggers from his friends. Forest are heading for the trapdoor, it is volunteered, because that is what happens when you are “a mess of a club.” They will not survive. Nuno will be the first manager sacked. It is time they headed back to the Championship. And on and on and on.
Nuno Espirito Santo has thrived at Forest since his arrival (Jon Hobley/Getty Images)
So perhaps the Nottingham folk are entitled to gloat if you recall, from The Athletic’s hope-o-meter poll last summer, that they did try to point out the recruitment had been sensible, the club had kept hold of their key performers, learned from previous mistakes and done everything, in short, to warrant an improvement in results.
Who, though, could have predicted Forest would be four points clear of Chelsea, six ahead of Manchester City, 16 better off than Spurs and 17 higher than Manchester United? Or that a club that spent almost a quarter of a century, from 1999 to 2022, outside England’s top division would be threatening something remarkable? Or that it doesn’t feel entirely silly — OK, just a little silly, perhaps — to ask whether they could catch and overhaul Liverpool, the club they used to measure themselves against?
“It would be the most astounding achievement in the modern game, even more incredible than Leicester’s title win in 2016,” says John Warrington, director of Local Heroes, the 2023 film about Forest’s glory years. “But I’ll compare it to the 1978-1980 team only if they go on to win two consecutive European Cups.”
Nobody is getting carried away here (Forest are still a 10,000-1 shot for the title, according to Opta’s number crunchers). But equally, why shouldn’t they dream after so many years of drift? “Top four is definitely achievable,” says Warrington. “In terms of the title, it’s the old cliche of one game at a time. Beating Liverpool at the City Ground is a must if they are to do it.”
Perhaps it is also a reminder that, for any football fan, perseverance is an essential part of supporting your club. And that feels particularly relevant in Nottingham, where a generation of Forest fans (anyone basically below the age of 40) has never experienced anything like this before — and, in most cases, can reel off all sorts of calamities along the way.
Calamities? Just take your pick from a five-goal mauling against Yeovil Town — little, patronised Yeovil Town — in the 2007 League One play-offs (Forest being the only European Cup winner in history to drop into their third division) or the rather astonishing feat, in the previous season, of going out of the League Cup to Macclesfield Town, the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy to Woking and the FA Cup to Chester City.
Yeovil won 5-2 at the City Ground to reach the 2007 League One play-off final (Rui Vieira/Getty Images)
Maybe you could chuck in the tragicomedy of the two-time champions of Europe losing 4-0 at home to Scunthorpe United, live on television. Consider the melancholy of having Walsall as a bogey club. Or if we are talking about the era of Evangelos Marinakis’ ownership, that traumatising night against nothing-to-play-for Stoke City in the final match of the 2019-20 season, with a place in the Championship playoffs all but assured.
“On the morning of the match, my wife — who doesn’t care about football — asked me if there was any way we’d miss out on the play-offs,” says Phil Juggins, the fan, writer and co-creator of Forest fanzine Bandy & Shinty. “I started explaining what would have to happen, how complicated and unlikely it all was. I felt daft even entertaining it.”
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The only way Forest could mess it up was by losing to 17th-placed Stoke and Swansea City winning at Reading to pinch the last play-off spot. More than that, it would need a five-goal swing. And, with an hour gone, it was 1-1 in both games.
The rest was a blur: 66 minutes, Swansea’s second goal; 73 minutes, Stoke’s second goal; 78 minutes, Stoke’s third goal; 84 minutes, Swansea’s third goal; 90+1 minutes, Swansea’s fourth goal; 90+6 minutes, Stoke’s fourth goal. Full-time: Forest 1-4 Stoke; Reading 1-4 Swansea.
“If you’d given me a button to press that night to be rid of Forest forever, I’d have pressed it — no question,” says Juggins. “I remember climbing silently into bed, turning the light off and my wife asking in this really sad, small voice, ‘Why do they always f*** everything up?’”
Matty Cash, Jordan Smith and Joe Lolley trudge off after a costly defeat to Stoke (David Rogers/Getty Images)
The previous owner, Fawaz Al Hasawi, made it his ambition to win a third European Cup. Instead, his five years in the boardroom culminated, on the final day of the 2016-17 season, with a fans’ pitch invasion celebrating the rather less impressive feat of not being relegated back to the third division.
Then, in the first few years of the Marinakis regime, the club seemed stuck in Nowhereville again.
But then something interesting happened. Marinakis, an ultra-ambitious Greek shipping tycoon, started making changes. He brought in a new recruitment team, upgraded various departments and took a more hands-on role, especially once Cooper had led the team from the bottom of the Championship to an almost implausible promotion.
“I won’t lie, I didn’t see it coming,” Juggins says of Forest’s current quest for a Champions League place. “But looking at it logically, we’ve consolidated, matured and recruited brilliantly. Plus, some of the bigger clubs are knackered or in transition. We’re a good team that’s managed well.
“There’s a reason most of us felt more confident this past summer. Going back years, Forest always seemed to get the basic, foundational stuff wrong. It was this vortex of churn and disharmony, very emotional and reactive. Whenever we were decent, it felt like a happy accident. Now there’s ambition, a sense of identity, a joined-up approach and people who care.”
Take a walk round Nottingham city centre and it is probably no coincidence, with Nuno’s team riding high, that so many red and white scarves, hats, gloves and other items of Forest colour are on show.
Clough’s statue is on Speakers’ Corner, opposite the coffee house, Caffe Nero, where a group of 20 or so old faces, mostly in their 60s and 70s, gather every Wednesday morning for a reunion.
These guys are Forest through and through: the old Trent Enders, the East Standers, the home-and-away hardcore who went all over Europe, from Athens to Zurich, Munich to Madrid, to follow their team. They reminisce, swap stories, order more coffees and agree there will never be another ‘Cloughie’.
“We were lucky that we were the right age to see it all,” says Mick Meehan, a regular since ‘Coffee Club’ started three years ago. “Now, all the lads are talking about going to Europe again. It will be the last time, for the lads our age. We didn’t think we’d see it again. Now, though, when I pick up my granddaughter from school, I can hear all the kids talking about Forest instead of Man City or Paris Saint-Germain.”
Clough’s statue at Speakers’ Corner, Nottingham (Peter John Dickson/Getty Images)
Meehan’s first game was 1960, meaning he can remember the years BC (Before Clough) and still has the ticket stub from FC Zurich’s visit to Nottingham in the 1967 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup.
That didn’t end well. Forest won 2-1 at home, then lost the return leg 1-0 in Switzerland. Nobody had explained the away-goals rule and at the final whistle the Forest players remained on the pitch, unaware they had been knocked out and waiting for a period of extra-time that never came.
Not that it has been a bed of roses in the post-Clough years, either. “I’ll tell you how bad it got,” says Meehan, recalling an away trip early in the 2021-22 season. “We took a bus to Stoke. We lost one-nil, it was chucking down with rain and we didn’t have a shot on target.
“On the way home, I said to the other lads, ‘I can’t take any more — at the end of the season I’m not renewing my season ticket’. Whether I’d really have packed up, I don’t know. But then, a few weeks later, Steve Cooper came in. And that changed everything, didn’t it?”
Steve Cooper’s arrival at Forest ‘changed everything’ (Christopher Lee/Getty Images)
Head towards Shakespeare Street and there is a blue plaque on the side of the Playwright, formerly the Clinton Arms, to let drinkers know this is the pub where, in 1865, the meeting took place that led to the club’s formation. Or you can make your way up Mansfield Road to find the birthplace of Herbert Kilpin, founder of AC Milan, in what used to be a butcher’s shop.
But it has been a challenging few years for a city that has always been fond of its title as ‘Queen of the Midlands’.
Agamemnon and Menelaus, the famous concrete lions perched in front of Nottingham Council House, look across a square where the grand old Debenhams building has been rotting away since 2021. Demolition of the Broadmarsh shopping centre left a fenced-off eyesore in the city centre. Other shops lie vacant or boarded-up. Government commissioners were brought in after the city council effectively went bankrupt.
Nottingham, like a lot of English cities, could do with a bit more money being spent on it. Playing in Europe would lift the city’s esteem, attracting thousands of new visitors. The economic benefits would be considerable. And that — the Champions League — has to be the aim, especially when fifth place might be enough this season.
“It’s starting to feel real,” says Matt Oldroyd, co-founder of Forza Garibaldi fans’ group and author of Trailblazers, a forthcoming book about the club’s history. “Huge clubs that have been praised for their brilliance, and talked about as being in a title race, can’t pull away from us.
“We have broken long-standing unbeaten home runs, scored on grounds where others couldn’t and taken the only full set of points from Liverpool (winning 1-0 at Anfield in September), which nobody else in Europe has managed to do. This is the real thing, blossoming in front of us. We are a hard-working, intelligent and delightful team to follow.”
Forest have been the only team to win at Anfield so far this season (Robbie Jay Barratt/Getty Images)
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Philippe Auclair, the London-based journalist, author and musician, made that clear in a column for Eurosport, written in French, that did not sound hugely enthralled by Forest’s strategy since promotion.
“What was this strategy? Spend. Spend more, much more, than the Premier League regulations allowed,” Auclair wrote. “Marinakis and his advisers knew it was unlikely Forest would escape a points deduction. What mattered was to build up a sufficiently comfortable cushion to withstand the shock to come.”
Auclair did go on to credit Nuno for his managerial abilities, the players for performing so admirably and the fervour of the City Ground. This was no hatchet job. His conclusion, however, was that it was difficult not to feel a “hint of bitterness” when the subject of all this attention had been clobbered with a four-point penalty last season for breaching spending rules.
“No,” wrote Auclair, “the story unfolding at Nottingham is not the fairytale we might have thought, even if finding Brian Clough’s two-time European champions at the top of the table may stir our nostalgia.”
No team, Auclair may be aware, had ever survived relegation with 32 points. Forest did, though. “So they stuck to their guns and survived by finishing six points ahead of relegated Luton Town, who had stayed on course throughout and whose incredible rise from League Two was the real ‘fairytale’ of this Premier League season. But who is now in the running for a place in Europe?”
It is an interesting topic, with arguments on both sides. As one aside, however, you would be hard-pressed to find many people in Nottingham calling it a fairytale. In football, fairytales are usually for small clubs with no history of sustained success. Forest’s return to the top table, in contrast, always seemed likely one day for a club whose trophy count features a league title, four League Cups, the European Super Cup and, pre-Clough, two FA Cups.
Forest fans unveil a tifo during the Premier League match at home to Bournemouth in August 2024 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
They have done it this season with the 14th-highest wage bill of the 20 top-division clubs. It is shaping up to be — possibly — the most unexpected Premier League achievement since Leicester, 30 miles away, won the league as 5,000-1 outsiders in 2016. And now, like then, there is a heck of a bond between the team and the fans.
At most clubs, it is usually just a few players who are popular enough to hear their names sung. With Forest, every member of the team has a chant. Anderson is “the Geordie Maradona”, Morgan Gibbs-White the “best on earth”. Nuno has one, too. To have replaced a manager with Cooper’s popularity and done what he has this season, including two Manager of the Month awards, makes a mockery of the way the Portuguese was written off after his time with Tottenham Hotspur.
The biggest “told-you-so” belongs to Marinakis given that he boldly proclaimed, a day after promotion, that trophies, new glories and great things were on their way and the general reaction, many fans included, was: “Steady on, mate…”
As for the long-awaited development of the City Ground, that is another vision for the future. And newsflash: Benoy, the architectural firm run by former Forest chairman Tom Cartledge, is no longer driving the project (Cartledge left his role at Forest in October and was removed as a club director the following month).
Talks are understood to have been held with Foster and Partners, the architectural firm that helped to design the new Wembley and has also consulted with Manchester United about Old Trafford. New ideas have been shared. Marinakis wants the new-look City Ground to take an upwardly mobile club to another level. And, though the redevelopment saga has been dragging on since 2019, maybe it will be worth the delay.
Forest’s fans, more than most, understand that good things come to those who wait.
(Header photo: Getty; Marc Atkins; Mike Egerton/PA Images. Design: Dan Goldfarb)
