FoxinRutland
Roofer
Singing "you're getting sacked in the morning " to Chris Hughton 
Forest fans
- Thread starter FoxinRutland
- Start date
ClaphamFox
Roofer
Hughton has gone, according to reports…
neverbemastered
Roofer
Shame, he's been doing a sound job.
channys6thswan
Lingers Long On Cank Street
Might be an unpopular thing to say on here but I personally think it’s a tragedy that a club with such a European pedigree should be going down the crapper. Which is why I’m so glad they got all three points tonight against those totally deluded, Billy Davies obsessed, Paper Lace loving, cave-inhabiting wild souvlaki botherers from Notts.
neverbemastered
Roofer
Wessy Boy
Roofer
In Forest’s case, it is coming up for 23 years out of the Premier League. It is a quarter of a century since the club reached the quarter-final of any club competition. In one season, though, there was the pretty spectacular feat of going out of the League Cup to Macclesfield Town, the LDV Vans Trophy to Woking and the FA Cup to Chester City.
The curtains twitch, the wind howls. Over time, you come to realise the club are still talking about their European Cups, from 1979 and 1980, because there is little else for modern-day supporters to embrace. “Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that,” went up the cry when Arsenal rolled into town for a cup tie a few years ago. “Champions of Europe, you weren’t even born,” came the response from the away end.
theathletic.com
The curtains twitch, the wind howls. Over time, you come to realise the club are still talking about their European Cups, from 1979 and 1980, because there is little else for modern-day supporters to embrace. “Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that,” went up the cry when Arsenal rolled into town for a cup tie a few years ago. “Champions of Europe, you weren’t even born,” came the response from the away end.
Nottingham Forest: A baffling club desperately in need of some common sense
After former Forest striker David Johnson called the board 'a disgrace', The Athletic examines what has gone wrong at the City Ground
theathletic.com
ClaphamFox
Roofer
“The curtains twitch, the wind howls. Over time, you come to realise the club are still talking about their European Cups, from 1979 and 1980, because there is little else for modern-day supporters to embrace.”In Forest’s case, it is coming up for 23 years out of the Premier League. It is a quarter of a century since the club reached the quarter-final of any club competition. In one season, though, there was the pretty spectacular feat of going out of the League Cup to Macclesfield Town, the LDV Vans Trophy to Woking and the FA Cup to Chester City.
The curtains twitch, the wind howls. Over time, you come to realise the club are still talking about their European Cups, from 1979 and 1980, because there is little else for modern-day supporters to embrace. “Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that,” went up the cry when Arsenal rolled into town for a cup tie a few years ago. “Champions of Europe, you weren’t even born,” came the response from the away end.
Nottingham Forest: A baffling club desperately in need of some common sense
After former Forest striker David Johnson called the board 'a disgrace', The Athletic examines what has gone wrong at the City Ground
That those lines were written by Daniel Taylor, a Forest supporter, somehow makes them even more damning.
channys6thswan
Lingers Long On Cank Street
When I got serious about Citeh in the 1960s I remember my Dad going about the decline of Huddersfield Town. Forty years before, they’d just missed out on a fourth successive League title, had dominated English football throughout that period, record attendance of 67,000, won the FA Cup etc, and had dropped out of the top flight only fifteen years before. And I couldn’t get what he was on about because by then they seemed like an irrelevance to me, like he was telling me about the Relief of Mafeking.
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Walthamstowfox
Roofer
This is a decent read about the current state of the club.
There is a story in Mark Hodkinson’s book, Blue Moon — Down Among The Dead Men with Manchester City, that brings to mind what it is like to be a Nottingham Forest supporter these days.
Hodkinson had been given inside access to cover the story of City’s 1998-99 season in the old Third Division, when it was Macclesfield Town, not Manchester United, who were their local derby and Jamie Pollock in midfield rather than Kevin De Bruyne.
One particular scene came from the club’s AGM when one of the supporters stood up to confront the directors. “Frustration gets the better of him,” Hodkinson writes. “He speaks quickly, very quickly, without a pause for breath. ‘I’m sick of my dad and his mates going on about Colin Bell and Francis Lee and all that lot. It all happened years ago. I’m 24 and all my life I’ve been fed…’ He tails off suddenly, his voice shrill, ‘Shit, 20 years of shit’. He is almost screaming now.”
In Forest’s case, it is coming up for 23 years out of the Premier League. It is a quarter of a century since the club reached the quarter-final of any club competition. In one season, though, there was the pretty spectacular feat of going out of the League Cup to Macclesfield Town, the LDV Vans Trophy to Woking and the FA Cup to Chester City.
The curtains twitch, the wind howls. Over time, you come to realise the club are still talking about their European Cups, from 1979 and 1980, because there is little else for modern-day supporters to embrace. “Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that,” went up the cry when Arsenal rolled into town for a cup tie a few years ago. “Champions of Europe, you weren’t even born,” came the response from the away end.
Unlike City, however, Forest do not have an AGM. There is no real access to the people at the top of the chain. Dane Murphy, the new chief executive, has given more interviews in two months than his predecessor, Ioannis Vrentzos, and the club’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, have between them over the previous four years. But there has not been any real accountability since the takeover went through in 2017 and, for the most part, the relevant people have gone unchallenged.
All of which made it feel even more extraordinary when David Johnson, the former Forest striker, decided at the weekend that he had seen and heard enough.
“Just so angry and disappointed how this club is run,” Johnson wrote on Twitter. “It’s embarrassing (the whole board should have gone) they are a disgrace. The last time I said anything bad about the club, Giannis called me. I’ll wait for his call, I guess, as I was right the first time.”
That was some tweet (complete with an angry emoji) if you consider Johnson’s history with the club, his popularity among the fans and the fact his son, Brennan, is one of the current players.
Nottingham Forest
David Johnson scores against Preston North End in August 2002 (Photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
It is difficult, indeed, to think of any previous occasion, anywhere, when a player’s father, with so many links to that club, has called for boardroom resignations. Yet Johnson Sr lives in the city, attends every game and connects with the supporters. He has had 30 years in the business, also working as an agent, and has always preferred to say it as he sees it.
“Giannis”, to introduce him properly, is Vrentzos, whose occupation is listed on the Nottingham Forest page at Companies House as chief executive officer. Except Forest brought in Murphy over the summer to be chief executive. Forest removed Vrentzos from the role on the “Who’s Who” section of the club website. Yet Vrentzos has remained on the board and is still actively involved behind the scenes, as Marinakis’ right-hand man, even though he has returned to Greece after four years in Nottingham.
Confused? It is certainly an unusual set of events. Hypothetical, perhaps, but imagine bringing in a new manager because the last one has failed, but then keeping the previous guy in the dugout. Would the new manager really want his predecessor sticking in his oar? When Forest get around to removing Chris Hughton as manager, which feels like an inevitability after the club’s worst start to a season in 108 years, will he remain in the background?
It sounds absurd, which is why it never happens. Yet this is Forest at boardroom level: the Mysterious Case of the Two Chief Executives. And if you have followed this story, you will realise that Vrentzos, more than anyone, has been the central figure since Marinakis, the owner of Olympiakos, took control amid a blitz of PR.
That summer, the newly appointed chairman, Nicholas Randall QC, invited the Nottingham Forest Supporters’ Trust into the boardroom for coffee and biscuits. I was at the same meeting and, looking back, it was a mistake to be reeled in by what I heard.
Forest, Randall explained, had a five-year plan that would involve promotion to the Premier League and qualifying for Europe. There would be a new state-of-the-art training ground because the club recognised that the present one was small and shabby. Forest would have “Champions League-level facilities” at the City Ground and there would be a change in culture, too, after all the mistakes of the previous owner, Fawaz al Hasawi.
Everything Forest did from that point onwards, Randall pledged, would be undertaken with the class and values of old-school Arsenal. It sounded bliss. How could we, as Forest supporters, not like what we had heard?
Before anything, though, there was a very strange moment when Randall turned on Andy Caddell, one of the trust’s board members, and proceeded to lambast him in a way that was genuinely shocking for everyone present.
Randall explained that he had an issue with Caddell and that, if they were going to work together, the club wanted to know from day one that he could be fully trusted. Caddell, now the trust’s chairman, said very little but looked thoroughly shocked. And it was difficult not to leave that meeting without thinking this was Forest setting the ground rules: the trust answered to the club, not the other way around.
Four years on, the reality is stark. Forest have taken one point from their first six games. Last season it was zero points from the first four and the team never went higher than 14th position. Only two other clubs in the entire EFL — Derby County and Southend United — scored fewer goals.
Hughton has won promotion from the Championship before, but so did Martin O’Neill and Aitor Karanka. They quickly become statistics in a managerial wasteland. Everything is pointing towards these being Hughton’s last days in charge.
“The supporters of this football club are black and blue from the torment of previous years,” a series of Twitter posts from the Forza Garabaldi fans’ group began after the 2-1 defeat at home by Cardiff City on Sunday. “‘Long suffering’ does not begin to explain what we have had to endure, and still it continues.”
When I went back for the previous home game, I was struck by how much the place needed a bit of proper care. It was my first visit to the City Ground, post-lockdown. The whole place looked tatty. There was grime on the windows, cobwebs beneath my seat. Photographs have appeared showing other parts of the ground, including season-ticket holders’ seats, covered in what looks like several months’ worth of bird droppings, possibly even longer.
The Karaiskaki Stadium, home of Olympiakos, is absolutely spotless, by the way.
As for behaving in the traditions of old Arsenal, there probably isn’t the space to list all the players and members of staff who have left Forest in difficult circumstances and with very little positive to say about the manner in which the club, pre-Murphy, operated behind the scenes.
Some fans also appear to have experienced this hard-faced nature. One story that got a fair bit of traction on Twitter recently involved a fan recalling how in the pre-Murphy era he was allegedly told to apologise for his online criticisms of the club or his daughter, then eight, would be stopped from being mascot at an upcoming game.
If you want to remind yourself why Forest is such a special club, watch this video by Copa 90 — “The Greatest Story in Football” — about the glory years and other notable parts of the club’s history, including a section about Nigel Doughty, the club’s former owner, who died suddenly in 2012, aged 54.
The fans loved it. Forest, not so much. Indeed, the club were so aggrieved that it focused on Doughty rather than the current ownership, director Jonny Owen fired off an email to Copa which made it clear their relationship with the club was over.
These are the board members Johnson means — Vrentzos, Randall, Owen (and absolutely not Murphy) — when he looks at the club where his son plays, with all the football knowledge he has accrued from three decades in the industry, and makes the legitimate point that everything starts from the top.
Murphy, previously Barnsley’s chief executive, wants to implement an entirely new philosophy, with a younger, more vibrant team and an understanding that Forest cannot keep wasting millions of pounds on ageing players with long contracts and no re-sale value. He wants to bring in a more modern approach, in line with the other clubs who have left Forest behind.
It sounds ideal. Murphy’s appointment has been celebrated by Forest’s supporters, who want to believe he can rescue what Simon Jordan, the former Crystal Palace owner, described this week as a “busted flush”.
Murphy’s reputation in football is for nurturing common sense, structure and bringing in shrewd people behind the scenes. But it is also a significant change in direction for Forest and there have been rumours on social media that Murphy — who is in the US this week to get married — has given serious consideration to resigning. The Athletic’s understanding is that he intends to stick it out but that his first couple of months have been an eye-opener, to say the least.
Even so, it is tempting to think he still does not fully understand the tragicomedy that has gone before him.
The time, for example, the players returned from their summer holidays to find that four showers had been knocked out of their dressing room to create an ice bath. Nobody, however, had put in the ice bath. So when the players turned up for the first game there was said to be just a plastic sheet and not enough showers.
Or the pre-season fixture when Forest realised they had no ice for the changing rooms so sent somebody around all the local supermarkets to buy as many bags as he could carry. The problem was he returned just as the crowd were starting to leave, got caught in the traffic and sat in a jam beeping his horn, as the bags of ice thawed out on his back seat. And these are just the stories about ice.
Then there was the time, going back a few years, when if you were to type Marinakis’s name into Google the first news item that came up was an article in the Guardian headlined: “Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis accused of drug trafficking”.
The article, written by the newspaper’s Greek correspondent, explained how the Greek public prosecutor had accused Marinakis and three of his associates of running a criminal organisation following a three-year investigation into the Noor 1, a tanker intercepted in the port of Piraeus carrying 2.1 tonnes of heroin in 2014. Marinakis strenuously denied all the allegations, and the prosecutor doesn’t appear to have taken this any further.
One of Forest’s directors got in touch (I was the Guardian’s chief football writer at the time) some time later to ask whether the article could be taken down because, well, it wasn’t ideal for the club or Marinakis to have such a headline being prominent on search engines. It was a strange request. Which newspaper would remove a legitimate story this way?
But Forest must have felt strongly about it because Randall, with his QC background, followed it up with a letter to make it official. The answer from the Guardian was a slightly bemused “sorry, but that’s not how it works” and Forest, it is fair to say, were distinctly unimpressed about not getting their own way.
nottingham-forest-marinakis-hughton-karanka
Marinakis took over Forest in 2017 (Photo: Clive Mason/Getty Images)
Marinakis didn’t seem to hold a grudge, though. Some time later, the same director got in touch to set up a separate conversation. “Mr Marinakis has decided he wants to buy the Guardian,” he said. “If they don’t want to sell the whole organisation, he is willing to put in £10 million. Can you arrange a meeting with the relevant people?”
Marinakis, it was explained, already had his own media empire in Greece and was sympathetic to the Guardian’s politics. And to be fair to the guy, none of the accusations against him — the alleged criminality, the match-fixing, the accusation that Marinakis was involved in blowing up a bakery owned by a referee — have ever come to anything. Marinakis has a clean record, with nothing proven, and has always denied any wrongdoing.
All the same, it was slightly bemusing to think that a 200-year-old institution such as the Guardian, owned by the Scott Trust since 1936, might want to sell up to a football club owner. It needed a delicate conversation to explain that it probably wasn’t a goer. And unfortunately for the supporters of this baffling club — with some of the biggest crowds in the Championship and, on current evidence, the worst team — it is just one of many stories to create the impression that, with Murphy at the helm, hopefully there can be an outbreak of common sense.
Another look at the “Who’s Who” section on Forest’s website, meanwhile, tells its own story. Francois Modesto, who was prominently involved in the most chaotic recruitment system in the club’s history, is listed as the technical director even though it is understood he has gone back to focusing more on Olympiakos.
Taymour Roushdi, previously Barnsley’s secretary, followed Murphy from Oakwell to become Forest’s head of football administration, sitting beside him in the directors’ box at the weekend. George Syrianos, formerly Stuttgart’s head of analytics, has been brought in to add expertise to Forest’s recruitment department. He and Roushdi have impressive reputations.
Chris Brass arrived from Wigan Athletic, where he was head of football operations, to help find new players. A lot of positive moves have been made behind the scenes. Yet Forest haven’t updated their website with any of these names. The club, contacted by The Athletic, say they will get round to it, and that they are trying their best to keep the stadium clean. Forest had yet to respond to our request for comment on other matters at the time of publication.
Until Murphy mentioned the changes in his programme notes last weekend, it was starting to feel like a club that did not want supporters to know what went on behind the scenes. It is a club that initially chose to say it was categorically untrue that Murphy was coming in as chief executive. And, unless something dramatically changes, that dreamy five-year plan could end with the team sleepwalking into League One.
Suffice to say, there has been no new training ground, no Champions League-level facilities (the proposed new stand is a story in itself), and the nearest the club have got to promotion was a seventh-placed finish under Sabri Lamouchi. Despite the goodwill for Murphy, Forest’s supporters seem increasingly sceptical about a regime that has over-promised and under-delivered far too many times.
Johnson has now deleted his tweet — and that’s fair enough, given that his son is a member of the dressing room — but his criticisms would have seemed positively mild if Brian Clough was around these days to remind us what he thought about the people in the boardroom he used to call bluffers and know-nowts.
Dear old Cloughie never liked club directors at the best of times. He’d have wanted some of these people chucked in the River Trent.
(Top photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)
There is a story in Mark Hodkinson’s book, Blue Moon — Down Among The Dead Men with Manchester City, that brings to mind what it is like to be a Nottingham Forest supporter these days.
Hodkinson had been given inside access to cover the story of City’s 1998-99 season in the old Third Division, when it was Macclesfield Town, not Manchester United, who were their local derby and Jamie Pollock in midfield rather than Kevin De Bruyne.
One particular scene came from the club’s AGM when one of the supporters stood up to confront the directors. “Frustration gets the better of him,” Hodkinson writes. “He speaks quickly, very quickly, without a pause for breath. ‘I’m sick of my dad and his mates going on about Colin Bell and Francis Lee and all that lot. It all happened years ago. I’m 24 and all my life I’ve been fed…’ He tails off suddenly, his voice shrill, ‘Shit, 20 years of shit’. He is almost screaming now.”
In Forest’s case, it is coming up for 23 years out of the Premier League. It is a quarter of a century since the club reached the quarter-final of any club competition. In one season, though, there was the pretty spectacular feat of going out of the League Cup to Macclesfield Town, the LDV Vans Trophy to Woking and the FA Cup to Chester City.
The curtains twitch, the wind howls. Over time, you come to realise the club are still talking about their European Cups, from 1979 and 1980, because there is little else for modern-day supporters to embrace. “Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that,” went up the cry when Arsenal rolled into town for a cup tie a few years ago. “Champions of Europe, you weren’t even born,” came the response from the away end.
Unlike City, however, Forest do not have an AGM. There is no real access to the people at the top of the chain. Dane Murphy, the new chief executive, has given more interviews in two months than his predecessor, Ioannis Vrentzos, and the club’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, have between them over the previous four years. But there has not been any real accountability since the takeover went through in 2017 and, for the most part, the relevant people have gone unchallenged.
All of which made it feel even more extraordinary when David Johnson, the former Forest striker, decided at the weekend that he had seen and heard enough.
“Just so angry and disappointed how this club is run,” Johnson wrote on Twitter. “It’s embarrassing (the whole board should have gone) they are a disgrace. The last time I said anything bad about the club, Giannis called me. I’ll wait for his call, I guess, as I was right the first time.”
That was some tweet (complete with an angry emoji) if you consider Johnson’s history with the club, his popularity among the fans and the fact his son, Brennan, is one of the current players.
Nottingham Forest
David Johnson scores against Preston North End in August 2002 (Photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
It is difficult, indeed, to think of any previous occasion, anywhere, when a player’s father, with so many links to that club, has called for boardroom resignations. Yet Johnson Sr lives in the city, attends every game and connects with the supporters. He has had 30 years in the business, also working as an agent, and has always preferred to say it as he sees it.
“Giannis”, to introduce him properly, is Vrentzos, whose occupation is listed on the Nottingham Forest page at Companies House as chief executive officer. Except Forest brought in Murphy over the summer to be chief executive. Forest removed Vrentzos from the role on the “Who’s Who” section of the club website. Yet Vrentzos has remained on the board and is still actively involved behind the scenes, as Marinakis’ right-hand man, even though he has returned to Greece after four years in Nottingham.
Confused? It is certainly an unusual set of events. Hypothetical, perhaps, but imagine bringing in a new manager because the last one has failed, but then keeping the previous guy in the dugout. Would the new manager really want his predecessor sticking in his oar? When Forest get around to removing Chris Hughton as manager, which feels like an inevitability after the club’s worst start to a season in 108 years, will he remain in the background?
It sounds absurd, which is why it never happens. Yet this is Forest at boardroom level: the Mysterious Case of the Two Chief Executives. And if you have followed this story, you will realise that Vrentzos, more than anyone, has been the central figure since Marinakis, the owner of Olympiakos, took control amid a blitz of PR.
That summer, the newly appointed chairman, Nicholas Randall QC, invited the Nottingham Forest Supporters’ Trust into the boardroom for coffee and biscuits. I was at the same meeting and, looking back, it was a mistake to be reeled in by what I heard.
Forest, Randall explained, had a five-year plan that would involve promotion to the Premier League and qualifying for Europe. There would be a new state-of-the-art training ground because the club recognised that the present one was small and shabby. Forest would have “Champions League-level facilities” at the City Ground and there would be a change in culture, too, after all the mistakes of the previous owner, Fawaz al Hasawi.
Everything Forest did from that point onwards, Randall pledged, would be undertaken with the class and values of old-school Arsenal. It sounded bliss. How could we, as Forest supporters, not like what we had heard?
Before anything, though, there was a very strange moment when Randall turned on Andy Caddell, one of the trust’s board members, and proceeded to lambast him in a way that was genuinely shocking for everyone present.
Randall explained that he had an issue with Caddell and that, if they were going to work together, the club wanted to know from day one that he could be fully trusted. Caddell, now the trust’s chairman, said very little but looked thoroughly shocked. And it was difficult not to leave that meeting without thinking this was Forest setting the ground rules: the trust answered to the club, not the other way around.
Four years on, the reality is stark. Forest have taken one point from their first six games. Last season it was zero points from the first four and the team never went higher than 14th position. Only two other clubs in the entire EFL — Derby County and Southend United — scored fewer goals.
Hughton has won promotion from the Championship before, but so did Martin O’Neill and Aitor Karanka. They quickly become statistics in a managerial wasteland. Everything is pointing towards these being Hughton’s last days in charge.
“The supporters of this football club are black and blue from the torment of previous years,” a series of Twitter posts from the Forza Garabaldi fans’ group began after the 2-1 defeat at home by Cardiff City on Sunday. “‘Long suffering’ does not begin to explain what we have had to endure, and still it continues.”
When I went back for the previous home game, I was struck by how much the place needed a bit of proper care. It was my first visit to the City Ground, post-lockdown. The whole place looked tatty. There was grime on the windows, cobwebs beneath my seat. Photographs have appeared showing other parts of the ground, including season-ticket holders’ seats, covered in what looks like several months’ worth of bird droppings, possibly even longer.
The Karaiskaki Stadium, home of Olympiakos, is absolutely spotless, by the way.
As for behaving in the traditions of old Arsenal, there probably isn’t the space to list all the players and members of staff who have left Forest in difficult circumstances and with very little positive to say about the manner in which the club, pre-Murphy, operated behind the scenes.
Some fans also appear to have experienced this hard-faced nature. One story that got a fair bit of traction on Twitter recently involved a fan recalling how in the pre-Murphy era he was allegedly told to apologise for his online criticisms of the club or his daughter, then eight, would be stopped from being mascot at an upcoming game.
If you want to remind yourself why Forest is such a special club, watch this video by Copa 90 — “The Greatest Story in Football” — about the glory years and other notable parts of the club’s history, including a section about Nigel Doughty, the club’s former owner, who died suddenly in 2012, aged 54.
The fans loved it. Forest, not so much. Indeed, the club were so aggrieved that it focused on Doughty rather than the current ownership, director Jonny Owen fired off an email to Copa which made it clear their relationship with the club was over.
These are the board members Johnson means — Vrentzos, Randall, Owen (and absolutely not Murphy) — when he looks at the club where his son plays, with all the football knowledge he has accrued from three decades in the industry, and makes the legitimate point that everything starts from the top.
Murphy, previously Barnsley’s chief executive, wants to implement an entirely new philosophy, with a younger, more vibrant team and an understanding that Forest cannot keep wasting millions of pounds on ageing players with long contracts and no re-sale value. He wants to bring in a more modern approach, in line with the other clubs who have left Forest behind.
It sounds ideal. Murphy’s appointment has been celebrated by Forest’s supporters, who want to believe he can rescue what Simon Jordan, the former Crystal Palace owner, described this week as a “busted flush”.
Murphy’s reputation in football is for nurturing common sense, structure and bringing in shrewd people behind the scenes. But it is also a significant change in direction for Forest and there have been rumours on social media that Murphy — who is in the US this week to get married — has given serious consideration to resigning. The Athletic’s understanding is that he intends to stick it out but that his first couple of months have been an eye-opener, to say the least.
Even so, it is tempting to think he still does not fully understand the tragicomedy that has gone before him.
The time, for example, the players returned from their summer holidays to find that four showers had been knocked out of their dressing room to create an ice bath. Nobody, however, had put in the ice bath. So when the players turned up for the first game there was said to be just a plastic sheet and not enough showers.
Or the pre-season fixture when Forest realised they had no ice for the changing rooms so sent somebody around all the local supermarkets to buy as many bags as he could carry. The problem was he returned just as the crowd were starting to leave, got caught in the traffic and sat in a jam beeping his horn, as the bags of ice thawed out on his back seat. And these are just the stories about ice.
Then there was the time, going back a few years, when if you were to type Marinakis’s name into Google the first news item that came up was an article in the Guardian headlined: “Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis accused of drug trafficking”.
The article, written by the newspaper’s Greek correspondent, explained how the Greek public prosecutor had accused Marinakis and three of his associates of running a criminal organisation following a three-year investigation into the Noor 1, a tanker intercepted in the port of Piraeus carrying 2.1 tonnes of heroin in 2014. Marinakis strenuously denied all the allegations, and the prosecutor doesn’t appear to have taken this any further.
One of Forest’s directors got in touch (I was the Guardian’s chief football writer at the time) some time later to ask whether the article could be taken down because, well, it wasn’t ideal for the club or Marinakis to have such a headline being prominent on search engines. It was a strange request. Which newspaper would remove a legitimate story this way?
But Forest must have felt strongly about it because Randall, with his QC background, followed it up with a letter to make it official. The answer from the Guardian was a slightly bemused “sorry, but that’s not how it works” and Forest, it is fair to say, were distinctly unimpressed about not getting their own way.
nottingham-forest-marinakis-hughton-karanka
Marinakis took over Forest in 2017 (Photo: Clive Mason/Getty Images)
Marinakis didn’t seem to hold a grudge, though. Some time later, the same director got in touch to set up a separate conversation. “Mr Marinakis has decided he wants to buy the Guardian,” he said. “If they don’t want to sell the whole organisation, he is willing to put in £10 million. Can you arrange a meeting with the relevant people?”
Marinakis, it was explained, already had his own media empire in Greece and was sympathetic to the Guardian’s politics. And to be fair to the guy, none of the accusations against him — the alleged criminality, the match-fixing, the accusation that Marinakis was involved in blowing up a bakery owned by a referee — have ever come to anything. Marinakis has a clean record, with nothing proven, and has always denied any wrongdoing.
All the same, it was slightly bemusing to think that a 200-year-old institution such as the Guardian, owned by the Scott Trust since 1936, might want to sell up to a football club owner. It needed a delicate conversation to explain that it probably wasn’t a goer. And unfortunately for the supporters of this baffling club — with some of the biggest crowds in the Championship and, on current evidence, the worst team — it is just one of many stories to create the impression that, with Murphy at the helm, hopefully there can be an outbreak of common sense.
Another look at the “Who’s Who” section on Forest’s website, meanwhile, tells its own story. Francois Modesto, who was prominently involved in the most chaotic recruitment system in the club’s history, is listed as the technical director even though it is understood he has gone back to focusing more on Olympiakos.
Taymour Roushdi, previously Barnsley’s secretary, followed Murphy from Oakwell to become Forest’s head of football administration, sitting beside him in the directors’ box at the weekend. George Syrianos, formerly Stuttgart’s head of analytics, has been brought in to add expertise to Forest’s recruitment department. He and Roushdi have impressive reputations.
Chris Brass arrived from Wigan Athletic, where he was head of football operations, to help find new players. A lot of positive moves have been made behind the scenes. Yet Forest haven’t updated their website with any of these names. The club, contacted by The Athletic, say they will get round to it, and that they are trying their best to keep the stadium clean. Forest had yet to respond to our request for comment on other matters at the time of publication.
Until Murphy mentioned the changes in his programme notes last weekend, it was starting to feel like a club that did not want supporters to know what went on behind the scenes. It is a club that initially chose to say it was categorically untrue that Murphy was coming in as chief executive. And, unless something dramatically changes, that dreamy five-year plan could end with the team sleepwalking into League One.
Suffice to say, there has been no new training ground, no Champions League-level facilities (the proposed new stand is a story in itself), and the nearest the club have got to promotion was a seventh-placed finish under Sabri Lamouchi. Despite the goodwill for Murphy, Forest’s supporters seem increasingly sceptical about a regime that has over-promised and under-delivered far too many times.
Johnson has now deleted his tweet — and that’s fair enough, given that his son is a member of the dressing room — but his criticisms would have seemed positively mild if Brian Clough was around these days to remind us what he thought about the people in the boardroom he used to call bluffers and know-nowts.
Dear old Cloughie never liked club directors at the best of times. He’d have wanted some of these people chucked in the River Trent.
(Top photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)
sixthswan
Non-Member
There is no way I’m supporting F***** ever
neverbemastered
Roofer
Nice read that.
S
SardiniaFox
Guest
Sacked
ClaphamFox
Roofer
The bookies have already installed Chris Hughton as favourite for the job after concluding that nobody else will take it.
haardaarss
Registered
I had a roadside visit from the RAC who administered the Relief of Mafeking car won't start.
