Nottingham Forest received a further £38million ($51m) in shareholder funding across April, May and June of this year, taking total owner funding at the City Ground in 2025-26 beyond £100m.
Forest, whose accounting year runs from July to June,
received share injections in each of the final three months of that period:
£11.5million in April, £15m in May and another £11.5m in June. In conjunction
with £48.23m in September 2025 and £15.04m the following December, it means the
club received £101.3m in a single year from above; Forest are 80 per cent owned
by Evangelos Marinakis, who bought the club nine years ago and is its main
benefactor.
The latest injections, which appeared in filings at UK
Companies House on Wednesday, lay bare the cost of running Forest, even in a
season where they progressed to the Europa League semi-finals. Per The
Athletic’s estimate, that run garnered around £21million in prize
money, though that was mostly offset by reduced takings at home. A fall from
seventh to 16th saw a £15m drop in Forest’s Premier League prize money, the
largest drop of any club last term.
It came on the back of significant transfer spending in
summer 2025, and Forest have routinely relied on Marinakis to underwrite losses
during his time at the helm.
In the eight seasons to the end of 2024-25, Forest lost a
combined £237million, making a profit just once. That came in 2023-24, when the
sales of Brennan Johnson, Orel Mangala, Moussa Niakhate and Odysseas
Vlachodimos turned a £75m pre-player sale operating loss into a £10m profit.
Without such sales a year later, losses lurched again, leaping over £70m for
the first time.
Marinakis provided £89.1million in new cash then, and Forest
upped their external lending by £25m, refinancing an existing debt by borrowing
£50m from Apollo Management. Yet, even
with the then-club record sale of Anthony Elanga to Newcastle (£52m) last July,
these latest filings confirm the 2025-26 season as Forest’s most reliant yet on
Marinakis’ deep pockets. The £101.3million injected over the course of last
season means that his funding of the club is a smidge shy of £350m in nine
years. Far from Premier League status conferring wealth on the owner, his
infusions have only grown larger.
Marinakis is a man who has historically courted controversy,
but he led Forest back into the top flight after a 23-year absence and
continues to be a committed financial backer as they head into their fifth
consecutive season of Premier League football.
The owner’s cash injections have principally gone toward
funding operations and transfers, with only £36million spent on infrastructure
in those eight years to June 2025, a period in which Forest received £336m in
funding overall, encompassing both Marinakis’ injections and external lending.
The infrastructure figure will leap up once the redevelopment
of the Peter Taylor stand finally begins, but with that still stuck in the
design phase, the bulk of Marinakis’ first nine-figure season will have gone
towards the day-to-day and that summer transfer spend.
It means Forest are likely to have made another sizeable
loss in 2025-26, reflecting a trend where few English clubs, even in the
Premier League, actually make any money. Their position would be greatly
improved if the new club-record sale of Elliot Anderson to Manchester City for
£116million was included in the previous accounting period, though Forest
announced that agreement on July 2, which falls into 2026-27.
UEFA allows clubs to lose an adjusted maximum of €60m (£52m)
over three years, increasable to a total of €90m (£78m) if certain financial
health metrics are met, which English clubs usually fail to comply with.
Forest’s deductible expenses are minimal, so it is uncertain how they came in
under the required limit.
Such European rules are of little concern currently but,
under Glasner, Forest hope UEFA regulations will apply again soon enough. The Anderson sale will go some way toward
assisting them there, and weaning them off reliance on an owner who has been
far from shy in funding the club he bought nine years ago.
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