Nottingham Forest lost 2-0 at Brentford and were booed by their own fans. Oliver Glasner's underlying numbers are strong, but the table and the owner matter.
Nottingham Forest are third in one table and third-bottom in the other, and only one of them pays the manager's wages.
Forest lost 2-0 at Brentford on Saturday and were booed off by their own supporters, Sky Sports reports. The away end sang a profane question about what they had just watched. Nikola Milenkovic's own goal gave Brentford the lead after good work from Dango Ouattara, and Igor Thiago sealed it late with a deflected strike. Sky says Forest did not hit the target until the 79th minute and remain the lowest scorers in the league, with six goals.
The numbers say one thing
The Guardian's match report makes the case that Forest have been unlucky. It says no side has underperformed their expected goals as badly this season, and that Forest went into the weekend third in Opta's expected table but third-bottom in the real one.
Against Brentford they had 15 shots to Brentford's six, the Guardian reports (the Standard counts 12), and both Brentford goals took heavy deflections off Milenkovic. It puts Oliver Glasner's problem down to finishing, saying he has "a fine track record" and, chance conversion aside, has not done much wrong.
The money problem
The headline is a striker. Liam Delap arrived in the summer from Chelsea for £50m, according to the Guardian, and has scored once since. He was taken off 20 minutes into the second half after three shots, none on target. That is a lot of money attached to a lot of missed chances, and it is the kind of arithmetic owners notice.
Which brings us to the owner. The Guardian describes Evangelos Marinakis as "notoriously impatient" and says good underlying numbers are unlikely to hold his trigger finger for long. That is the Guardian's judgement. It is not a report that Forest are planning anything, and the Sky and Guardian pieces carry no word from the club on Glasner's position.
What the market thinks
Bookies.com's price list, published on Friday before the match, had Glasner at 16/1 with TalkSport Bet to be the next Premier League manager sacked, well behind Michael Carrick and Pierre Sage at 5/4. The Evening Standard's headline on its match report says pressure is mounting on Glasner. Prices struck before a defeat are out of date by definition.
The tension
An expected-goals table is a useful diagnostic and a poor defence. It tells a club that results should improve, but a club that needs a run of bad finishing to reverse itself is relying on luck turning the other way.
For Glasner, the argument is that the process is sound and the finishing will come. For an impatient owner, the counter is that a £50m striker is meant to deliver now. Forest have not chosen between those readings in public, and the next few matches will show which one carries weight.
Read next: Crystal Palace's Pierre Sage, who has taken over the club Glasner left.
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
