After months of turmoil and uncertainty, Forest's future at the City Ground looks secure (2024)

Applause rang out in the chamber of the Nottingham City Council.

It was outside that building, on Nottingham’s Market Square, that Forest celebrated promotion to the Premier League in May 2022. Slightly more than two years later, this latest cause for jubilation might not be quite as significant, but it’s not far behind.

A saga that has gone on for years and which, until very recently, looked like it was going the other way, finally appears to be over. That came when the leader of the council, Labour’s Neghat Khan, confirmed that an agreement in principle was in place for Forest to purchase the freehold of the land the City Ground is on. This, in theory at least, means the club will stay at their home by the River Trent, where they have played for over 125 years.

Subject to agreement later this month, terms have been agreed with @NFFC for the sale of land owned by @MyNottingham at the City Ground.

With the successful completion of this deal, football is staying home on the banks of the Trent🔴⚪️🌳 pic.twitter.com/lrHnGqPEwz

— Nottingham Labour (@ng_labour) July 8, 2024

“All the discussions we’ve had with Forest, it’s been very clear that they want to stay there and expand, they don’t want to move,” Khan tells The Athletic. “Those are the assurances we’ve had: all the discussions we’ve had with them have been about how they want to stay there. For me, and for the city, that’s the key point.”

At this point, it’s worth emphasising that the deal is not yet completely done. Indeed, Forest felt it was worth emphasising that, releasing a statement on Monday evening which read: “After today’s comments from the leader of the City Council, the Club wishes to clarify the situation for supporters and stakeholders regarding the freehold for The City Ground.

“For absolute clarity, we continue to work on the terms for a conditional deal for the purchase of the freehold. Any decision to purchase the freehold will be entirely conditional on Nottingham Forest first being granted the relevant permissions that will allow us to realise our hugely ambitious plans for a significantly larger stadium capacity, world-class hospitality spaces and associated substantial real estate development in the vicinity of the ground.

“Our discussions remain confidential and the club will update fans when meaningful progress has been achieved.”

Even so, this is a significant step towards Forest remaining at the City Ground. After all, it was only two months ago that both owner Evangelos Marinakis and chairman Tom Cartledge seemed to make clear that they favoured relocation, to build a new stadium somewhere else. The Athletic revealed that the club had been in discussions over a site in Toton, a place almost as close to Derby as it is to Nottingham city centre.

But now Forest have seemingly committed their future to the City Groundby buying it. Previous discussions had centred on extending the leasehold — which has another 33 years to run — of the land that the stadium is on, discussions that essentially focused on the price the club were willing to pay. The current deal sees them pay £250,000 a year ($192,000), but new proposals suggested the council wanted annual dues of up to £1million.

In recent weeks, talk turned away from renting and to buying. The details of the deal have not yet been confirmed, but the council had the land independently valued at around £10m. For the club, spending roughly the same amount on their actual home as they did for Emmanuel Dennis seems like a no-brainer.

For the council, the situation was less ideal. As keen mathematicians will tell you, £1m (or even £250,000) per year over a potential 250-year lease will ultimately bring in more than the £10m they will receive for the sale.

But Nottingham City Council is, financially, in the soup. It effectively declared itself bankrupt last year. It has to save £68m this year and £172m over the next three years. One way to help lighten that financial burden is to make some quick sales of assets. Like, for example, the land a football ground is on. Such is the council’s position, a smaller amount now is preferable to a larger amount spread over many years, a little like those PSR-related transfers we’ve all loved so much in recent weeks.

“To be honest, I probably would have preferred the lease option over the sale, from a council point of view,” says Khan, who worked directly with Cartledge on the deal. “But the ball was in their court. We couldn’t force them because all the options were on the table. It was up to Forest. We’d rather keep them there than (Forest) move somewhere else.

“We’ve been very clear with Forest about where Nottingham City Council finds itself today. We’ve got some very tough decisions to make, but we’ve got to make sure we don’t do a fire sale and sell things cheap.

“They’re a football club, they’re always in transfer negotiations, they know when they’re getting a good deal, but we know it’s good for us, too.

“When we were looking at the leasing options when the price was £850,000, I said at the time, ‘That’s what they’re paying one player who hasn’t played since 2021’.” For context, she’s talking about Harry Arter, who finally left Forest this year. “It shows in football terms, it’s not that much.”

All of which leads one to wonder how genuine the club were in their threats to move. Was it just a combination of a weather balloon, putting the suggestion of a departure to Toton into the public domain to see how the fans would feel about moving (summary: not good) and a negotiating tactic?

If so, it worked. Khan only took up the role of council leader in May and she immediately put resolving the future of the City Ground near the top of her to-do list.

“This issue with Forest has been going on since 2019,” she says. “We’ve tried negotiating in the past, but it didn’t go through. The council is going through challenging times and with the time and resources it’s taken, we need to make sure we’re spending that time where it’s needed. We’ve been able to get this deal in principle in place and we can move on and deal with other issues we’ve got.

“My predecessor David Mellen and Councillor Steve Battlemuch had started on this work, but we wanted to make sure we got the deal done. This was one of the issues that kept coming up and we were keen to get it over the line, which hopefully we will do.”

I ask Khan if this represents a personal win for her, two months after taking her current position. “Yes it is,” she said. “An early win. People were saying, ‘Can Labour take tough decisions?’. You will see in the next couple of weeks that there are a lot of difficult decisions coming our way. This was an easy one for us.”

As Forest made clear, the deal is not yet officially confirmed. It will be put to a meeting of the council’s executive committee on July 16, which will vote on whether to ratify it. Khan expects it to be waved through without too many problems.

On the face of things, this means Forest’s future at the City Ground is secure for the long term. But in theory, because the club will own the land, they can do what they like with it, including selling it and moving elsewhere. However, Khan and her colleagues have tried to mitigate against that.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but that’s why there’s the clause in the deal that protects us from them leaving.”

Khan is coy about the details, but that clause includes a financial penalty for Forest, plus restrictions on the land’s use.

“If tomorrow, in the unlikely event that the club do something else, the council would have a financial right. And it limits what they could do with (the site), too.”

The clause doesn’t include a “first refusal” option, a guarantee that if Forest did decide to divest themselves of the land, the council would have the chance to buy it back. Such is its financial position, the council is not in a position to do that.

Forest are keen not to get ahead of themselves. Lessons have perhaps been learned from when the club announced in 2019 that a 250-year lease for the land had been agreed, but that turned out to be premature. That deal was agreed, but not signed, and was never finalised.

Over the intervening five years, the status of the deal has fluctuated. As different people have come and gone on either side, there have been personality clashes that have held things up. Covid didn’t help. The question of whether a new stadium would actually have been beneficial for the club has been debated at length.

As Forest alluded to in their statement, there would be little point in purchasing the freehold if they were unable to expand the City Ground in the ways they want. In theory, this removes the last significant obstacle to the long-mooted redevelopment of the Peter Taylor Stand and as such, the raising of the ground’s capacity to north of 40,000. It’s not quite as simple as that: for example, one of the curiosities of the City Ground is that technically it’s not in the city of Nottingham, so they have to agree things like permitted capacity with Rushcliffe Borough Council. But in theory, there are no significant reasons why work could not be started on the new stand next summer.

For her part, Khan says that, from her conversations with the club, they are committed to revamping the City Ground.

Mostly, though, people seem relieved that the future is clear. Or clearer, at least. The City Ground is a beautiful anachronism, the sort of idiosyncratic venue that nobody would ever design if they were starting from scratch, but it has provided some of the greatest days and nights the club has ever known. The atmosphere at games over the past couple of seasons have been better than most people can remember, even those who were around for the European Cup-winning days in 1979 and 1980.

“The ‘mist rolling in from Toton sidings’ is never going to take off,” says Battlemuch, who as well as being a Labour councillor who has been involved with discussions between club and council is a long-time season ticket holder.

“We know as fans that on many occasions it’s been the atmosphere that has got the team over the line. It’s unique in modern football to have a ground that, as Steve Cooper said, oozes football soul. People can walk over Trent Bridge, they see the ground, and then 10 minutes after the game, they’re back in town having a pint.

“I think what we all want to see is that being built on. I do want to see an expanded ground. I think we could get to 45,000 with some creativity, which would give it a further boost.”

For now, though, the future seems a bit more secure than it was. Given the way things can change at the club, often at whiplash speed, it would seem unwise to be absolutely certain. Forest’s statement made clear that this isn’t quite over the line yet, but Forest fans worried that they were about to lose a huge chunk of the club’s identity can breathe a little easier.

(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)