Has Nuno Espirito Santo’s ‘deeply personal’ rift with Edu seen the latter make a club-record signing the former doesn’t want and is thus not including in Nottingham Forest’s 25-man Europa League squad. Looks like it. Fight, fight, fight…
A season which started with Nuno slamming Nottingham Forest’s pre-season and their lack of transfer business and has already featured reports of him nearing the sack following a ‘spectacular fallout’ with Edu, along with a great Premier League win, an honourable draw and a shocking defeat, may now involve their club-record signing not making the 25-man squad for their first European campaign in 30 years as Edu, if anything, has gone too far in a bid to discredit his manager.
“We are very far off in terms of the squad,” Nuno said on the eve of the season. “The plans we had didn’t work out. The preparation in terms of the squad was not ideal. We don’t know what squad we have. We have players working here who know they are going out on loan. We have a big problem.”
We took it as criticism of Evangelos Marinakis, but after reports claimed the Greek owner was considering relieving Nuno of his duties at Forest, it was revealed that the manager’s big problem is with transfer guru Edu, whom he’s not on speaking terms with in what is a ‘potentially irreparable’ relationship after a ‘deeply personal’ rift opened up between them.
READ MORE: Marinakis push for Postecoglou shows ‘fuming’ Nuno is right to seek Nottingham Forest sack
Ten of the 13 players signed by Forest this summer joined the club after Nuno’s supposedly indirect but actually very clearly aimed slam of Edu, making this quite comfortably the biggest transfer window spend in the club’s history at £192.6m.
There was always a sense that Marinakis was waiting to get Crystal Palace out of the way before sanctioning a heavy spend to Europa-proof Nuno’s squad, but Forest’s promotion to that higher tier came on August 11, and the transfer blitz didn’t happen for at least another week, suggesting it was indeed Nuno’s public criticism which pushed Edu into action.
And such is their broken relationship, we wonder whether his laser focus from that point on was less down to an admission of negligence on his part and more about a desire to discredit Nuno’s claim of penny-pinching as he then went on to spend more money than all but five football clubs in world football this summer.
Nuno’s stance had changed ahead of their 3-0 defeat to West Ham – he was by that point warning that “the worst thing you can have is frustration” among players in a bulging squad in a complete U-turn. Edu must have enjoyed that and went on to sign a further three players on deadline day – Cuiabano, Dilane Bakwa and Oleksandr Zinchenko – to give his manager further selection headaches.
To the point where Omari Hutchinson, the £37.5m club-record signing, ‘could be left out of Forest’s 25-man squad for the league phase of the Europa League’, according to the Daily Mail’s Tom Collomosse.
That’s unconfirmed, the squad is set to be announced imminently, but it would represent an extraordinary shift from a point of concern from Nuno 19 days ago that his squad was ill-equipped to battle on multiple fronts, and could be seen as another shot fired at Edu.
Part of the problem for Nuno has been Edu’s cosy relationship with renowned super-agent Kia Joorabchian, which has pushed trusted ally Jorge Mendes from the Forest transfer picture, and who is the director of the agency which dealt with Hutchinson’s move from Ipswich to the City Ground.
Are these summer additions Nuno signings or Edu signings? Some will be both but all will be the latter as Marinakis has very much ‘aligned himself with Edu’, and nine substitute minutes for Hutchinson in two Premier League games for a club-record signing doesn’t suggest it was Nuno who was pushing for his arrival.
So while Hutchinson’s possible absence from the Europa League squad may indeed be a sign of Edu’s successful plot to embarrass Nuno through going overboard on signings after his pre-season slam, it may also indicate the manager pushing back against the formal Arsenal man making signings without his input.
“You can buy them, mate, but you can’t make me play them.”
