Nottingham Forest · History

Nottingham Forest Football Club, founded in 1865, is one of the oldest football clubs in the world and the author of one of the most improbable stories the sport has produced: a two-time champion of Europe from a provincial English city. Known simply as Forest, or the Reds, the club wears the «Garibaldi red» adopted in tribute to the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and has played since 1898 at the City Ground, on the banks of the River Trent, a stadium that today holds a little over 30,000 spectators. In the Premier League, Forest lived through a 2025-26 season that carried them to a European semi-final and, at the same time, to the edge of relegation.

Pioneers of the English game

The club was formed by a group of shinty players who met at the Clinton Arms in Nottingham and agreed to take up association football instead. Forest were pioneers of the primitive game in several respects: their forward Sam Weller Widdowson is credited with inventing shin-pads in 1874, cutting down a pair of cricket pads and strapping them over his stockings, and one of the club's matches in 1878 is remembered as the first in which a referee used a whistle. Popular tradition even holds that Arsenal's red shirts came from a set sent by Forest in the London club's earliest days, though Arsenal themselves regard the story as probably a myth. On the pitch, Forest won the Football Alliance in 1892 and joined the Football League that same year. Their first major trophy was the FA Cup in 1898, won 3-1 against Derby County of all teams, with a second added in 1959 through a 2-1 victory over Luton Town at Wembley. For much of the century in between, however, the club lived in the shadow of the great powers of the north and of London, moving between divisions without ever settling among the elite.

The Brian Clough era: two European Cups

Everything changed on 6 January 1975, when Brian Clough, the most charismatic manager English football has known, walked into the City Ground, later joined by his inseparable assistant Peter Taylor. With a newly promoted squad, Forest won the First Division in 1978 — still their only league title, taken seven points clear of Liverpool — and strung together a legendary run of 42 league matches unbeaten, ended only by Liverpool themselves in December 1978. What followed defied sporting logic: Forest won the European Cup in 1979, Trevor Francis heading the winner against Malmö on his European debut, and retained it in 1980 through John Robertson's goal against Hamburg. The same dynasty added the 1979 European Super Cup, won in the final against Barcelona, four League Cups (1978, 1979, 1989 and 1990) and the 1978 Charity Shield. Forest remain the only club to have won more European Cups than domestic league titles, and that double crown is still the great treasure of a roll of honour built long before the Champions League took its modern shape.

The City Ground, the home beside the Trent

The City Ground opened with the 1898-99 season — the first official fixture was against Blackburn Rovers on 3 September 1898 — and has been the club's home ever since, a rare case of rootedness in the modern English game. Its record attendance dates from October 1967, when 49,946 spectators watched Forest beat Manchester United 3-1 in the First Division. Squeezed between the river and the city's bridges, the ground boasts one of the most recognisable atmospheres in the country, and in December 2025 the club submitted a phased redevelopment plan — taking in the Peter Taylor Stand, the Trent End and the Brian Clough Stand — designed to push capacity beyond 52,500 seats in the long term, with work intended to begin in the summer of 2026.

Decline and 23 years in the wilderness

Clough retired in 1993, the same year Forest were relegated from the newly created Premier League. He was succeeded by Frank Clark, the left-back of the 1979 European Cup-winning side, who took the club straight back up as runners-up in the second tier, led them to third place in 1995 and to a UEFA Cup quarter-final in 1996. Beneath the surface, though, the debts were growing: Clark left in December 1996, the team finished bottom that season and, despite an immediate return, went down again in 1999. The calamitous years that followed, with David Platt's spell in the dugout deepening the financial damage, ended at the lowest point in the club's history: in 2005 Forest became the first former European champion to drop into the third tier of its own country, where they spent three seasons. Back in the second division from 2008, they spent more than a decade watching promotion campaigns collapse.

The road back: Cooper, Marinakis and Wembley

Under the ownership of the Greek shipping magnate Evangelos Marinakis, who completed his takeover on 18 May 2017 and also owns Olympiacos, redemption arrived with Steve Cooper. Appointed in September 2021 with Forest bottom of the Championship, he oversaw one of the most remarkable turnarounds in English football, dragging the team off the foot of the table and all the way to the 2022 play-off final, won 1-0 against Huddersfield Town at Wembley. After 23 years away, Forest were a Premier League club again — and this time they stayed, securing survival in each of the two seasons that followed, the second of them under Nuno Espírito Santo after Cooper's departure in December 2023.

2025-26: European semi-finalists with four managers

The 2024-25 campaign, with Nuno in charge, restored the club to the upper reaches of the table: seventh place opened the door to European football for the first time in three decades. The 2025-26 season was a rollercoaster without precedent. Forest ran all the way to the semi-finals of the Europa League, winning the first leg 1-0 through a Chris Wood penalty before falling 4-0 at Villa Park to Aston Villa, the eventual winners of the competition. In the league, meanwhile, they struggled to a 16th-place finish and got through four managers: Nuno, Ange Postecoglou, Sean Dyche and, from February 2026, Vítor Pereira, the coach who delivered both survival and the European semi-final.

Glasner's arrival

Despite that double achievement, the club parted company with Vítor Pereira on 2 July 2026 — the Portuguese said the decision took him by «complete surprise» — and four days later, on 6 July, appointed the Austrian Oliver Glasner as head coach. Glasner arrived as the manager of the moment in England: at Crystal Palace he had won the 2025 FA Cup, the first major trophy in the London club's history, the Community Shield and, in May 2026, the Conference League.

Identity and the Derby County rivalry

The Garibaldi red, the crest with its tree above the waters of the Trent and nicknames such as the «Tricky Trees» make for an identity nobody could mistake. Forest's fiercest rivalry is the East Midlands derby against Derby County, a fixture that decided that 1898 FA Cup final and is loaded with shared history — Clough managed and won the league title with both clubs — to the point that since 2007 it has been played symbolically for the Brian Clough Trophy. Together with the legacy of John Robertson, Stuart Pearce, Peter Shilton and Roy Keane, that memory makes the City Ground one of the grounds with the most history per square metre in English football.