Forest's ambitious and demanding owner

Steve Cooper has gone as Forest nanager.  That will leave many Forest supporters with conflicting emotions given that the manager and owner have, between them, conjured up the happiest times at the City Ground since the turn of the century.

On the one hand, the fans’ affinity to Cooper could be gauged by the remarkable support that was shown to him during the recent 13-match sequence when Forest won only once and fell to 17th in the Premier League table, leaving them five points above the relegation zone.

On the other hand, those fans are also grateful, in the extreme, for the financial backing from Marinakis and have come to appreciate that, at the heart of everything he does, there is a determination from the Greek shipping magnate to keep the club on an upward trajectory.

His methods can be unorthodox sometimes and anyone who has followed the story of Olympiacos — conspiracies, riots, near-unremitting drama and an official statement recently claiming Greek football was run by a mafia — will know how wild it can be inside the Piraeus-based club, where Marinakis recently appointed his sixth head coach in 16 months.

To a generation of Forest supporters, however, the good has far outweighed the bad since Marinakis took control from Fawaz al Hasawi in 2017 and bought a stagnating club that had little in its favour other than the comfort blanket of nostalgia.

Marinakis has deep pockets, big ambitions and a level of commitment that will always be appreciated by a fanbase that had, until Cooper’s appointment, spent almost a quarter of the century outside the top division.

And yet, there was also a thick portfolio of evidence that Cooper’s popularity with the fans troubled and, at times, irked the owner.

Marinakis did not believe Cooper had done enough during these past 18 months as a Premier League club to warrant the songs of adulation, the favourable headlines and the absence of any real criticism. It was not what he would have expected from the fans of a Greek club fighting relegation. And it was not the culture he wanted at Forest, either.

The people who understand Marinakis best say he wants to change the mindset of Nottingham as a football city. He wants an attitude that correlates more with Olympiacos, Greek champions a record 47 times, where there is an expectation of success every season and a mentality, for the most part, that anything else is unacceptable.