Nottingham Forest are at a critical point as the future of the club at the City Ground hangs in the balance
Nottingham Forest have been warned that any decision to leave the City Ground may lead them down the same path that saw Everton punished for breaches of the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR).
Talk of an expansion of the current ground began in 2019, but owner Evangelos Marinakis now appears intent on moving to ‘a bigger facility’.
It is a tense debate, and also a situation that Forest could easily find themselves on the wrong side of should they get it wrong, forewarns football finance expert Kieran Maguire.
The nuclear option as far as the club is concerned is to effectively walk away and move to a new stadium,” he tells Football Insider. “That would be a very costly exercise as, in the post-Brexit world, construction costs and labour costs have increased significantly.
“As we have seen with Everton, increased material costs, power costs and transportation fees makes building a new stadium a very costly exercise. But if the Forest board feels that the council is being intransigent, then this is an option that they have to consider.”
Both the Reds and the Toffees have been on the receiving end of point deductions relating to the league’s PSR. In Forest’s case it came down to exceeding the maximum losses.
Everton’s initial 10-point penalty – which was later reduced to six upon appeal – was for the same offence, though brought with it different complexities as involved in their financial statements was the cost of funding the construction of their 52,888-seater venue on Liverpool’s waterfront.
The stadium, which is due to be moved into ahead of the 2025/26 campaign, has a reported cost of £500m. Therefore as Forest weigh up the options of moving to a new site while hoping to put their Financial Fair Play troubles behind them, Maguire’s warning appears to be a sensible one.
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