McLeish’s Forty Days Crowns Seven Weeks of Madness at Nottingham Forest

A Forty-Day Reign

Forty days. For Alex McLeish, it was long enough to see Nottingham Forest through Christmas but not much else. His departure from the City Ground, confirmed this morning, marks the end of one of the shortest managerial tenures in recent memory and plunges an already turbulent club into deeper chaos. The writing had been on the wall for at least four and a half days, ever since the transfer deadline day fiasco which saw a deal for George Boyd collapse over a supposed failed eye test, only for the club to then offer Peterborough United a loan deal. McLeish’s pointed refusal to discuss his future after the weekend defeat to Birmingham City suggested his position was untenable. Now, it is official.

His appointment was met with scepticism from the start, given his recent records at Birmingham City and Aston Villa. A record of one win in seven matches did little to dispel the doubts. That solitary victory came against the Championship’s bottom club, Peterborough United, and was overshadowed by a humiliating FA Cup exit at home to League One strugglers Oldham Athletic. Yet, to blame McLeish entirely would be to ignore the increasingly bizarre circumstances under which he was forced to work. He leaves with a legitimate grievance that Nottingham Forest is becoming unmanageable, a victim of the eccentric stewardship of its owners.

This should concern everyone associated with the club, including those who felt McLeish was never the right man for the job.

The Al-Hasawi Effect

The story of Forest’s recent instability is a story of its ownership. Since taking over, the Al-Hasawi family has presided over a period of constant upheaval. Steve Cotterill lasted just two days into their reign. Sean O’Driscoll, appointed by Omar Al-Hasawi, was inexplicably sacked on Boxing Day immediately after a fine win against Leeds United that left the club a single point outside the play-off places. His replacement by cousin Fawaz Al-Hasawi in the corridors of power heralded a new, more interventionist approach that seems to have destabilised the entire club. Forest will now appoint their third manager of the season, and their fourth under the current owners.

The irony is that promotion remains a possibility. Despite the chaos, the club sits just six points adrift of the playoff positions with over a third of the season still to play. But timing is everything. Sacking a manager just after the transfer window has slammed shut is spectacularly poor planning. Any new appointment will inherit a squad they had no hand in shaping and a board with a demonstrated track record for impatience and interference. How many managers of the required calibre will look at the situation at the City Ground and decide it is a risk not worth taking? Forest is a grand old club, founded nearly 150 years ago and a two-time champion of Europe, more than Arsenal, Chelsea, and Manchester City combined. But history guarantees nothing.

A League in Panic

The situation at Nottingham Forest feels acute, but it reflects a wider panic gripping English football, particularly in the Championship. Over the last nine months, forty-four clubs across the top two divisions have changed their manager at least once. That is nearly half of the clubs in the Premier League and Football League. Fourteen of the twenty-four Championship clubs have made a change, a staggering figure that points to a desperate, high-stakes scramble for the riches of the top flight. This is not a new phenomenon, but it has been amplified to an extraordinary degree by the impending arrival of the next television contract.

This new deal promises a financial windfall so large that it warps all conventional thinking about how to run a football club. For some owners, the prize is the chance to establish their club in the Premier League in the sustainable manner that Swansea City has. For others, it is simply about the money. The television revenue creates the possibility, however remote, of running a club at a profit and for owners to cream some of that cash off for themselves. As recent years have shown, some owners do not even require a club to be profitable to find ways to extract money. This frantic race to the gilded twenty encourages short-termism, rewards recklessness, and creates the conditions for the kind of circus currently engulfing the City Ground.

For Forest supporters, these wider concerns are secondary to the immediate damage being done to their club. The question is whether the events of the last seven weeks are a symptom of a deeper malaise that threatens to consume one of English football’s great institutions.