Clough and Forest: the two impossible European Cups

On 6 January 1975, Brian Clough took charge of Nottingham Forest, a Second Division club sitting in the bottom half of the table. Five years and four months later he was lifting his second consecutive European Cup at the Santiago Bernabéu.

Promotion, then the league at the first attempt

Forest went up in 1976/77, finishing third on 52 points, a single point above Bolton and Blackpool. They did not celebrate it on the final day: their season had ended on 7 May, and promotion was only confirmed on the 14th, when Wolves beat Bolton. A full week of waiting.

And then, in their first season back in the top flight, they won the league. Forty-two matches, twenty-five wins, fourteen draws and three defeats: 64 points, seven clear of Liverpool, with two points for a win. They did not lose once at home. It was settled on 22 April 1978 with a 0-0 at Coventry, four games from the end. Kenny Burns was named Footballer of the Year by the writers and Peter Shilton by his fellow professionals.

Forty-two matches unbeaten

The run began on 26 November 1977 with a 0-0 at home to West Bromwich Albion, a week after losing 1-0 at Leeds. Match number forty-two was a 1-0 win at Bolton on 25 November 1978, and the sequence ended on 9 December with a 2-0 defeat at Anfield.

That is three hundred and sixty-four days without a league defeat: one day short of a calendar year. It stood as the English record until Arsenal put together forty-nine in 2004.

The million-pound man who cost £999,999

On 9 February 1979, Forest signed Trevor Francis from Birmingham City. Clough announced the fee deliberately as £999,999, one pound short of a million, to take the label off the player. With VAT and the Football League levy included the real cost was around £1.18m, so he genuinely was English football's first million-pound footballer.

One detail is almost always told wrongly: Francis was not cup-tied, because Birmingham were not in Europe. What kept him out was a UEFA rule requiring roughly three months between a transfer and eligibility. That is why he missed the quarter-final and semi-final, and why the Munich final was the first European club match of his entire career, on his hundred-and-tenth day at the club. Clough played him on the right wing.

Munich 1979 and Madrid 1980

On 30 May 1979, at the Olympiastadion in Munich, Forest beat Malmö 1-0. John Robertson beat his man on the left and hung a deep cross to the far post; Francis arrived from the other side and headed it into the roof of the net, in first-half stoppage time.

On 28 May 1980, at the Santiago Bernabéu in front of around 51,000, Forest beat Hamburg 1-0. Robertson scored around the twentieth minute: a one-two on the edge of the box and a low shot in off the inside of the post. Playing against them was Kevin Keegan, the reigning back-to-back Ballon d'Or winner.

Francis did not play in that second final: he had ruptured his Achilles. Forest retained the European Cup without their million-pound man.

The parts nobody tells you

In the first round of 1978/79, Forest drew Liverpool: the holders, who had also won the two previous editions. Forest won 2-0 at home and drew 0-0 at Anfield. In the semi-final against Köln they went 2-0 down inside twenty minutes at their own ground, recovered to lead 3-2 by the 63rd minute, were pegged back to 3-3 in the 81st, and then won 1-0 in Germany.

And there is a better detail still. In 1978 Forest won the League Cup with an eighteen-year-old goalkeeper, Chris Woods, because Shilton was cup-tied: he had already played in the competition that season for Stoke. Woods played every round, including both finals.

The other essential name is Peter Taylor, Clough's assistant from July 1976. He left in May 1982 saying he was retiring, and that November took the Derby County job. He then signed Robertson from Forest without telling Clough. They never spoke again.

That Forest side also dominated the League Cup: they won it in 1978 and 1979 and lost the 1980 final to Wolves, three consecutive finals. And the contrast with what followed is stark, because the club has not won an English league title since 1978 and spent much of the twenty-first century outside the top flight before returning to it.

"Nottingham Forest have won more European Cups than English league titles. It is the strangest arithmetic in football."

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