With great spending comes increased pressure, and Nottingham Forest have taken this to another level for Premier League new boys after agreeing a £42.5m deal for Wolves’ Morgan Gibbs-White.
Having already surpassed the £100m-mark this summer, Forest will take their spending to just shy of £150m if Gibbs-White completes his transfer.
It is undoubtedly an eye-watering figure for the 22-year-old, said to be £25m up front and £17.5m in add-ons, and is akin to Chelsea’s attempts to sign Anthony Gordon from Everton, who recently rejected a £45m bid for the 21-year-old striker.
Only Chelsea have spent more than Forest in the Premier League this summer, and evidently both are willing to pay premium prices for young English talent heading into the final fortnight of the transfer window.
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This roll of the dice has been seen before, with varying success. Fulham spent £105.3m after promotion as play-off winners in 2018 but were relegated with 26 points.
Then there was Aston Villa, who spent £144.5m after winning the Championship play-off final in 2019, placing them second that summer for expenditure behind Manchester United.
In the Premier League campaign that followed, Villa stayed up by the skin of their teeth, finishing 17th – just one point above Bournemouth and Watford.
How Championship play-off winners spent then fared
- 2018: Fulham – £105.3m – Relegated, 19th, 26 points
- 2019: Aston Villa – £144.5m – Stayed up, 17th, 35 points
- 2020: Fulham – £23m – Relegated, 18th, 28 points
- 2021: Brentford – £31.1m – Stayed up, 13th, 46 points
- 2022: Nottingham Forest – £149.4m* – TBC
*if Gibbs-White deal is agreed | Figures per Sky Sports
It is perhaps fitting that the club promoted via the play-offs feels this need to spend big. Having been unable to finish in the top two of the Championship, a fear you are entering the Premier League as the 20th best side is arguably what prompts this desire to dig deeper into the owners’ purses.
More recently, however, Fulham’s £105.3m exploits in 2018 put them off come 2020, but this opposing approach did not work either, while Brentford did not have much cash to spend last summer but ended up benefitting from having a largely unchanged squad.
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Have Liverpool already lost the title race to Man City? Even four points is a mountain to climb16 August, 2022But given recent history muddies the waters, with cases both for and against, Forest have opted to follow Fulham 1.0 and Villa before them, and in Greek shipping billionaire Evangelos Marinakis they have an owner willing to spend, ahem, a boatload of cash.
Emmanuel Dennis (£20m), Taiwo Awoniyi (£17m) and Neco Williams (£16m) go down as big-money arrivals already – by promoted clubs’ standards – but the fee for Gibbs-White would dwarf those figures. It is more than twice the amount spent on club-record signing Dennis and mirrors the spending of the Big Six.
They are the only Premier League clubs to have spent more on a single player this summer: Gabriel Jesus (Arsenal, £45m), Marc Cucurella (Chelsea, £60m), Raheem Sterling (Chelsea, £47.5m), Darwin Nunez (Liverpool, £85m), Erling Haaland (Man City £51m), Kalvin Phillips (Man City, £50m), Lisandro Martinez (Man Utd, £56.7m), and Richarlison (Tottenham, £60m).
That lays out why the Gibbs-White move is such a significant gamble. With previous outcomes plain for all to see, Forest CEO Dane Murphy explained earlier this summer that the club are all too aware of the fine balance between signing new recruits and trusting the squad that won promotion.
“We have a very strong owner who is not afraid to invest in the club and make sure it becomes the Premier League club it should be, in all facets of the business,” Murphy told US radio station Sirius XM.
Nottingham Forest summer transfers
Signing Gibbs-White for £42.5m would take Forest’s summer spending to £149.4m.
Sorted by reported fees
- Emmanuel Dennis – Watford, £20m
- Taiwo Awoniyi – Union Berlin, £17m
- Neco Williams – Liverpool, £16m
- Orel Mangala – Stuttgart, £12.7m
- Remo Freuler – Atalanta, £9m
- Moussa Niakhate – Mainz, £8.7m
- Omar Richards – Bayern Munich, £8.5m
- Lewis O’Brien – Huddersfield, £6m
- Giulian Biancone – Troyes, £5m
- Harry Toffolo – Huddersfield, £4m
- Cheikhou Kouyate – Crystal Palace, free
- Jesse Lingard – Manchester United, free
- Wayne Hennessey – Burnley, free
- Brandon Aguilera – Alajuelense, undisclosed
- Dean Henderson – Manchester United, loan
“There have been a few clubs who have gone up and spent an inordinate amount of money and then gone back down, and it hasn’t worked. In recent years you can look at Brighton and Brentford, even Sheffield United in the first year they went up: they didn’t spend a lot of money, they kept a core group of players that brought them up and tried to build off it. Sometimes in the second year it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
“I think it’s finding the balance between investing and making your team that much better to compete week in, week out, but still having your core group of guys.”
With each transfer the prospect of this core from last season contributing to this year’s cause diminishes, however, but despite Marinakis’ backing it is the task of head coach Steve Cooper to keep this squad happy and fighting on a united front.
It could go one of two ways, but Marinakis will hope £150m guarantees survival.
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