Nottingham Forest are a mystery wrapped in an enigma

The strange internal squabble between Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis, director of football Edu Gaspar and now former manager Nuno Espírito Santo has finally concluded after 3 weeks of drama. Nuno has been sacked, and former Tottenham Hotspur boss Ange Postecoglou has taken over.

If you’ve missed the soap opera and you’re wondering how the hell Nuno went from qualifying for Europe to sacked just three weeks into the Premier League season, this article from The Athletic is a good place to start. The tl;dr is that Nuno and Edu had an adversarial relationship from the start and stopped speaking to each other sometime this summer. Nuno publicly stated that his relationship with Edu and Marinakis had deteriorated.

Fans will probably disagree with the way Forest has handled this situation. And I’m not sure I’m buying the very pro-Forest brass, anti-Nuno slant in that above Athletic piece, given that Marinakis is such a huge personality with a history of controversy.

But I also agree with Forest’s apparent assessment that backing the manager and recruiting to his preferences was not the correct path forward for their club. Nuno caught lightning in a bottle last season and squeaked out a lot of lucky wins. Forest had a negative xG differential last year that was comparable to 16th and 17th placed Wolves and Tottenham. Their attack was simply not good.

And their xG has been rapidly trending in a negative direction too. Here’s a 10 game rolling xG differential average, starting at the beginning of last season. They’ve been playing relegation-quality football for quite some time.

If Forest aspire to do more than stay in the Premier League and ascend to the next tier of Premier League sides — the Aston Villas and Brightons of the world — they will have to change styles of play and recruit better technical players. They might crash and burn trying this and end up back in the Championship. I’m also skeptical of their current recruitment strategy, which involves a lot of influence for Kia Joorabchian and buying 4 players from Botafogo to help out Marinakis’ homie John Textor. Despite these legitimate criticisms, it’s also true that Nuno had reached his ceiling.

Edu and Marinakis clearly thought they could thread the needle here, recruiting for their longer-term strategy this summer while retaining a popular and successful manager until he was no longer either of those things. But once Nuno started giving pressers where he admitted he had a bad relationship with the owner and director of football, it was pretty clear that he couldn’t stick around much longer.

Enter Postecoglou, who achieved both a shocking 17th place finish in the Premier League and Tottenham’s first European trophy since 1984. Postecoglou has earned a bit of a negative reputation as an ideologue: a manager who sticks to his high pressing, high defensive line, attacking style of play even if he does not have the required personnel. He managed to flip that narrative in the Europa League final, where his Spurs team played one of the most negative and defensive matches you’re ever going to see.

This race chart is a work of art.

At Forest, Postecoglou will have to prove that he knows how to coach something between the way his best Tottenham sides played, and that Europa League final.

Nikola Milenković, one of the best central defenders in the Premier League last season, is not well-suited to a very high defensive line that asks CBs to cover a lot of space. Chris Wood, one of the most effective strikers in the Premier League last season, is about to turn 34 and not suited to leading an extremely active and high pressing system. Postecoglou’s “we’re committed to my style of football because we believe in it” schtick that he parrotted after so many Spurs losses is not going to fly here.

But he’s also got some really talented young attackers to work with. James McAtee, Dan Ndoye, Omari Hutchinson and Arnaud Kalimuendo all look like very promising signings. In midfield, Elliot Anderson is probably a better player than anyone he had to work with at Spurs. Murillo is probably the best ball-playing center back in the league outside of last season’s top 3, and I’m excited to see what he can do in a more attacking side.

I don’t know if Marinakis or Nuno is more at fault for their blow-up. I don’t know if their dealings with Joorabchian and Textor make any football sense. I don’t know if Postecoglou is the right man to transition Forest to a more ambitious style of play without destroying their defense. But I do know that Forest was fake good last season, and running it back was going to result on them finishing in the bottom half.

The direction Forest are heading in might be crazy, but it’s less crazy than maintaining the status quo would have been.

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