2009/10 to 2017/18

Nottingham Forest never reached the Premier League in the nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18, spending nine in the Championship. Their best finish was 3rd in the Championship, in 2009/10. They didn’t win a major trophy. Over those nine summers they paid £26.8m in transfer fees and took in £39.5m, a net profit of £12.7m.

Nottingham Forest began this period looking like a club on the way back. Third in 2009/10 with 79 points and sixth in 2010/11 meant two play-off campaigns. Neither ended in promotion, and what followed was seven seasons of drift. Eighth was the best of it, and in 2016/17 they stayed up only on goal difference, level on 51 points with relegated Blackburn.

Forest kept producing and selling. Jamaal Lascelles and Karl Darlow went to Newcastle in 2014, Oliver Burke to RB Leipzig for £13m in 2016, and Britt Assombalonga, bought from Peterborough for £5.5m, was sold to Middlesbrough for £15m in 2017.

For a two-time European Cup winner, a decade in the second tier is a long sulk. The 115.football Forest save starts with those early play-off seasons. Turn one of them into promotion, keep the academy graduates, and the City Ground can stop looking back at its history and start making some more.