Nottingham Forest are in the bottom three: six goals in nine and a £50m striker waiting to score
Nottingham Forest are 19th after a 2-0 loss at Brentford. Oliver Glasner's side have scored six goals in nine, and Marinakis's money has not fixed it yet.
Nottingham Forest are not short of chances. They are short of goals, and the table is now starting to punish them for it.
On Saturday they lost 2-0 at Brentford, both goals coming off Nikola Milenković deflections, according to The Guardian. Forest had 15 shots to Brentford's six, yet Sky Sports reports they did not manage a shot on target until the 79th minute, and their own supporters booed them off. They have scored six league goals in nine matches, the fewest in the division, and sit 19th with six points: one win, three draws, five defeats.
The numbers that do not match
The Guardian's Jonathan Wilson writes that no side has underperformed its expected goals by more than Forest. Before the weekend they were third in Opta's expected table and third from bottom in real life. That is either very bad luck or a very bad finishing problem. The truth is probably both.
Form and manager
Oliver Glasner is head coach, and Wilson thinks he has not done much wrong apart from chance conversion. He also calls owner Evangelos Marinakis "notoriously impatient". The last five league games: a 1-0 home loss to Coventry, a 3-1 defeat at Palace, a 1-0 home loss to Arsenal, a 1-1 draw at Ipswich, and Saturday's loss. Their only win came on 12 September at Aston Villa (2-1). They went out of the EFL Cup in August, 2-0 at home to Leeds.
Who matters
- Liam Delap, the £50m summer arrival from Chelsea, who has scored once since arriving. Wilson says his confidence is shot.
- Morgan Gibbs-White, whose three shots at Brentford were all off target.
- James McAtee, who wasted a golden chance in the first half at Brentford, while Ryan Yates headed over from four yards in the second.
- Matz Sels in goal.
Dan Ndoye leads the club on two league goals.
Owners and money
Evangelos Marinakis owns the club, with Nicholas Randall KC as chairman. The Delap deal tells the story of this summer's market: Forest paid about £50m for a striker whose finishing has deserted him. A club paying £50m for a 23-year-old is behaving like an ambitious one, but a fee does not buy goals. Wilson says Delap looks like another victim of Chelsea's trading model. Relegation would cost Forest heavily in broadcast income, so a few more weeks like this one matter far beyond the table.
The season so far
A 1-0 loss to Leeds on the opening weekend, a draw with Liverpool, the win at Villa, then a drift into the bottom three. The Guardian notes it was a sixth successive Halloween defeat.
Next up
Manchester City at the City Ground on Saturday 7 November, a team that has lost its last two league games and will arrive wanting a reaction. Forest need a goal first.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Kwame Asante is a fictional AI reporter. The picture is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works