‘Why Jose Mourinho is the right choice to be the next manager of Nottingham Forest’ is, for multiple reasons, a truly insane sentence to be wriring here in big 2025.
Thank you, football. Thank you, Mr Marinakis.
It had become increasingly clear over the first few weeks of the season that Nuno Espirito Santo would be leaving a club he had dragged from a relegation fight to European football. A big part of why it had become clear was Nuno himself saying as much. Repeatedly. At every press conference. With little prompting.
Even in an era of brutal managerial sackings, this is a brutal managerial sacking, and Forest sheepishly announcing it past midnight on an interlull night tells its own story. The specific burial of the news does at least hint at some microscopic level of hitherto undetected self-awareness within Mr Marinakis.
But as always with a sacking, no matter how harsh it may be, we must all move swiftly on to speculating about the next poor sod. Like we say: brutal.
And almost never has that been more true than right now with Forest. Because it’s going to be Ange Postecoglou, with the only other apparently serious contender being Jose Mourinho. And that is lovely stuff.
For us, to be clear. Lovely stuff for us. Almost certainly not lovely stuff for Forest.
Because while we can’t help but feel slightly disgusted at ourselves for thinking it, we also cannot escape the nagging feeling that if you have bizarrely and needlessly narrowed your choices down to those two and you have at your disposal the current Nottingham Forest squad, then Mourinho is the less mad choice.
The days where Mourinho’s brief managerial residencies were characterised by destroy-and-exits in his third season now seem wonderfully quaint. Fair to say he has now perfected and streamlined the process, and is now capable of getting sacked within months. And that’s at clubs that aren’t run by Marinakis.
If Mourinho had rocked up at Forest he could very well have been out by Christmas given the perfect storm that a Mourinho-Marinakis meeting of minds represents.
But, while not at all sensible, it’s almost certainly more sensible – or less unsensible, at least – than the actual plan. The equally if not identically hilarious prospect of bringing Angeball straight back to the Premier League.
The problem with Angeball is that every Premier League team has thoroughly worked it out. Don’t buy into the myths and legends about last season. Yes, Spurs’ run to Europa League glory was brilliant and hilarious and boiled oceans of p*ss and has rattled Arsenal fans specifically far more than it should have. We wouldn’t change a thing about it, we have no notes on that.
But while Spurs absolutely and correctly did prioritise the Europa League across the final months of that season, it still doesn’t fully explain away the sheer scale of the awfulness of their league results.
After a 4-1 win at Ipswich in February silenced any lingering nagging doubts about actual for real relegation, Spurs won just one further Premier League game – at home to a historically bad Southampton – and lost nine.
And even that only amounted to a deepening of a trend going all the way back to the end of that dizzy honeymoon period where Spurs won eight and drew two of Postecoglou’s first 10 league games. And even that run, in hindsight, has more caveats than were acknowledged at the time given how fortunate Spurs were to register wins against both Sheffield United and Luton – not to mention an infamous win over Liverpool in a game so utterly ridiculous that grown adults felt comfortable saying out loud that it should maybe be replayed.
The injury crisis was another excuse exposed over those closing weeks of the season, with Spurs’ league form showing no upward trajectory even as more and more injured players returned. And that’s without even getting into just how responsible Postecoglou’s unique brand of nonsenseball actually is for causing that injury crisis in the first place given the demands it places upon players to cover huge distances at high speed.
Even Postecoglou’s magnificent bravado act of winning actual silverware at actual Tottenham is of dubious relevance to Nottingham Forest. Sure a proven ability to win the Europa League is relevant to their situation, but what on earth is the point of appointing a manager whose calling card is winning things in his second season when you’ve got Mr Marinakis and his itchy trigger finger running the show?
Forest’s squad is absolutely not without its charms, and they do have attacking players who look well suited to a spot of Angeball. Morgan Gibbs-White very, very obviously.
But the squad as a whole is one that has been built for Nuno’s less adventurous yet highly effective low-block-and-counter methods. It is not one populated with the full-back/No. 10 hybrids Angeball leans upon so heavily. Nottingham Forest have several extremely competent defenders. None of them scream ‘high line’ to us.
It is a squad, in short, that is far more suited to Mourinho than Postecoglou.
Neither appointment should be one to fill Forest fans with confidence. There are far, far more sensible names on this list or potentially poachable from within the Premier League itself. A move for Oliver Glasner has appeal, if you’re the sort of person who just likes watching the world burn.
Forest fans probably wouldn’t welcome the idea, but even going full Leicester and attempting to lure Brendan Rodgers from Celtic – where all is decidedly not rosy – to the East Midlands makes a fair amount of sense.
But we are delighted, for our own selfish reasons, that Forest appear set to choose the far more entertaining path of opting for Postecoglou.
For the first time in a while, even appointing Mourinho looked the less obvious disaster waiting to happen.
