Nottingham Forest Spent Their Way Into Europe, and Into an £80m Loss
A stunning push toward the Champions League places came with an owner-backed spending spree that these accounts show in full.
In the 2024-25 season covered by these accounts, Nottingham Forest finished 7th in the Premier League under Nuno Espirito Santo, spending large parts of the season in the Champions League places before ultimately securing European football via a strong finish, one of the genuine surprise stories of the campaign.
That leap forward was backed by heavy investment from owner Evangelos Marinakis, with a wave of squad signings across the season, including the arrival of Elliot Anderson from Newcastle for a fee in the region of £35m, pushing staff costs to around £170m and contributing to a pre-tax loss of roughly £80m, among the largest in the Premier League that year.
Turnover still grew by around 17% to close to £220m as improved league form lifted broadcast and matchday revenue, but the scale of spending on new arrivals meant the club's financial result moved in the opposite direction to its league position.
Forest's transfer business also drew regulatory attention during the season, with questions raised over squad registration rules after an unusually busy window, underlining just how aggressively the club pursued its push for Europe.
Forest's rise from relegation battlers to European contenders in the space of a couple of seasons has been funded, not accidental, and these accounts are the clearest evidence yet of what that funding looks like.
Marinakis's willingness to absorb losses of this size marks Forest out from most of the mid-table Premier League clubs around them, closer in approach to a club with genuine European ambitions than one recently battling relegation. Sustaining that level of investment year after year, without the Champions League revenue to offset it, remains the club's central financial challenge going forward.
European qualification brings welcome extra income the following season, but it also brings extra fixtures, extra squad demands and extra scrutiny of a recruitment strategy that has already drawn regulatory questions once. How Forest balance continued ambition with financial sustainability will be one of the more interesting subplots of English football's next few seasons.
Forest's climb up the table came with a price tag to match, an £80m loss that shows just how much owner backing has driven the club's rapid rise.