Nottingham Forest Profile

Nottingham Forest Football Club are a professional soccer club based in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, England.

They were founded in 1865 and are the second-oldest professional soccer club in England. The oldest are their neighbours and local rivals, Notts County.

Since 1898, Forest have played their home matches at the City Ground.

Forest have one of the most illustrious histories in all of English football. They won back-to-back European Cup titles in 1979 and 1980.

This was achieved under the guidance of long-serving manager, the late Brian Clough, who also led Forest to the league title in 1978.

Clough, who died in 2004, will rightly be remembered as one of the greatest British managers in the history of the game.

In May 2022, after an absence of 23 years, the club was finally promoted back to the top flight of English football after a 1-0 victory over Huddersfield Town in the Championship play-off final at Wembley.

Forest were founded by a group of shinty players who decided to change to soccer in 1865. Nottingham Forest's first game was against Notts County, with the match taking place in 1866.

Forest were initially a multi-sport club and they had a charitable approach to soccer.

Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal and Brighton & Hove Albion are clubs who benefitted from this, with Forest playing a role in helping their rivas form.

Nottingham Forest donated a set of shirts to Arsenal to help get the club up and running. They also did the same for Everton and helped Brighton & Hove Albion by securing a site so they could play.

In the 1878/79 season, Forest participated in the FA Cup for the first time in their history.

Playing at Beeston Cricket Ground, Forest beat neighbours Notts County 3-1 in the first round, but they were beaten 2-1 by Old Etonians in the semi-finals of the competition.

In 1888, the Football League was formed, but Forest's application to join the set-up was initially rejected. Instead, the club joined the Football Alliance in 1889.

In 1892, Forest emerged as winners of the competition and subsequently joined the Football League.

That season, they reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup for the fourth time, but lost to West Bromwich Albion in a replay.

In 1897/98, Nottingham Forest finally won an FA Cup semi-final at the fifth attempt. They beat Southampton 2-0 in a replay after the first game was drawn 1-1.

Forest came up against Derby County in the final of the FA Cup - and were beaten 5-0 by their fierce rivals days before the big game.

However, on the day of the final, Forest emerged victorious by a scoreline of 3-1. Their rivalry with Derby County would persist in decades to come, although there was no way of knowing this at the time.

Forest struggled in the first half of the 20th century, sliding up and down the divisions and battling financially at times.

In 1957, they were promoted to the top flight and the seeds of a rebuild at the club had been well and truly planted.

Forest beat Luton Town 2-1 in the 1959 FA Cup final and in 1967 they mounted a strong challenge for the Football League title.

Ultimately, they finished second that season and were beaten in the semi-finals of the FA Cup by Tottenham Hotspur.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw Forest experience a slump.

However, that was to change following the appointment of Brian Clough as manager on January 6, 1975.

Both Clough and Forest had their backs against the wall at the time, with Clough having been dismissed by Leeds United at the end of a 44-day spell and Forest struggling to match their strong form from a decade prior.

Forest were 13th in Division Two at the time of Clough's arrival and finished 16th at the end of that season.

Forest finished eighth in Clough's first full season in charge.

Then, at the end of the campaign, he brought in Peter Taylor, his title-winning assistant at Derby County. Taylor was unimpressed with the state of the squad.

In 1977, Forest narrowly regained promotion to the top tier of English soccer. They finished with 52 points, a record low points tally for a promoted team.

One of the most astute signings Forest made during their rise up the ranks was Kenny Burns.

He went on to become the Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year in 1978 following a move from centre-forward to centre-back.

Forest won the league in 1978 with Peter Shilton starring in goal. It would be the last time that a team would win the top-flight title immediately after being promoted.

As well as beating Liverpool to the title by seven points, Forest beat the Merseyside giants 1-0 in the Football League Cup final replay.

Forest went on to knock Liverpool out of the following season's European Cup too.

This was en route to winning Europe's elite club prize as they beat Malmo 1-0 at the Olympiastadion in Munich in the 1979 European Cup final.

They retained the trophy in Madrid the following year, beating Hamburg 1-0.

After the double European Cup-winning side was broken up, Forest struggled to regain their dominance.

They managed to win the League Cup in 1989, but were relegated from the newly-formed Premier League in 1993 which brought Clough's 18-year managerial reign to an end.

Frank Clark returned Forest to the top flight the following campaign but after three seasons they fell back into Division 1 again.

Forest returned to the Premier League in the 1998/99 season but finished bottom and so began a long exile from the top flight.

Finishing 23rd in the 2004-05 season saw relegation to League 1, the lowest the club had fallen since a spell in Third Division South in 1950/51.

After three seasons in League 1, Forest clawed their way back into the Championship under Colin Calderwood.

Apart from a couple of failed play-off challenges between 2009-2011, Forest maintained a fairly mundane existence in the Championship, flirting with relegation more than promotion and shuffling their way through managers on an almost season-by-season basis.

They finally won promotion back to the top tier of English football for the first time in 23 years after a 1-0 victory over Huddersfield Town in the Championship play-off final in May 2022 under manager Steve Cooper.

Nottingham Forest's home ground - the City Ground - has a capacity of 30,445.

Nottingham Forest have a local rivalry with Notts County, while another with Sheffield United has its roots in the miners' strike of 1984/85 when Nottinghamshire miners insisted on a ballot and kept working.

The club's fiercest rivalry is with East Midlands neighbours Derby County.

Evangelos Marinakis has 80% shares at Nottingham Forest and Sokratis Kominakis 20%.