Nottingham Forest's Bold Ambition to Win Trophies Again

Nottingham Forest have spent four years clawing their way back towards relevance. Now the ambition is bolder: to make the Trent run silver again.

At the heart of that push stands a new figure. The Austrian tactician who turned Crystal Palace into serial cup winners has swapped south London for the East Midlands, arriving with an FA Cup, Community Shield and Europa Conference League already on his CV. Linked not so long ago with Manchester United and Chelsea, he now walks into a very different kind of project – one steeped in history, weighed down by expectation, and bankrolled by an owner who does not like standing in the shadows.

Crucially, he has time. An early summer appointment has handed the 51-year-old a full pre-season to reshape a squad built under Vitor Pereira. This is not a fire-fighting mission. It is a chance to imprint ideas, to strip things back, to decide who belongs in the next chapter and who does not.

The churn has already started. Elliot Anderson’s departure to Manchester City for a record £116 million has detonated the transfer market around Forest and opened up a vast pool of money to reinvest. Evangelos Marinakis has never been shy when it comes to spending, nor squeamish about changing the man in the dugout if he feels the returns are not swift enough. He will expect that fee to be turned into a team that does more than simply survive.

Forest have not exactly drifted since returning to the Premier League. They have reached semi-finals in the Carabao Cup, FA Cup and Europa League, proving they can trouble the elite when the draw opens up and the mood takes hold. The club is competitive again. The stadium is noisy again. The badge matters again.

But in Nottingham, competitive is not the dream. The honours board still leans heavily on the “Miracle Men” of Brian Clough, on a manager who built not one but two great sides and made Wembley feel like a second office. For those who lived it, that era is not a sepia-tinted myth. It is a standard.

Des Walker was there when Forest’s second great team took shape, having watched the European Cup triumphs that turned Clough’s first side into legend. In the late 1980s and early 90s, Wembley became a familiar destination and trophies followed with a regularity that now feels distant. Since then, only a Championship play-off final win has disturbed the dust in the trophy cabinet.

Asked whether Forest can rediscover the habit of lifting cups, Walker does not flinch. Speaking to GOAL in association with talkSPORT Bet Online Slots, the former defender leans on experience and on the personality of the man who owns the club.

“I'd like to think so, yeah,” he says. “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.”

Then Walker reaches back to a lesson from his own early days, a line that has stayed with him for decades.

“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!

“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.

“Can you build a team to win the league? That's going to be difficult. 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. 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.”

That is the tightrope Forest now walk. Building a squad capable of sustaining a league challenge in an era of state-backed giants is a monumental task. Constructing one dangerous enough to run hot in knockout football? With this level of investment, this manager’s cup pedigree and an owner desperate to dance at Wembley, that feels far less far-fetched.

The Miracle Men still cast a long shadow over the City Ground. The question for this new regime is simple: are they ready to step out of it and write a story of their own?