Nuno Espirito Santo’s revenge season: Suing Nottingham Forest while fighting them in a relegation battle

When Nottingham Forest sacked Nuno Espirito Santo on September 9, 2025, just three games into a season for which he’d signed a brand new three-year contract three months earlier, the general feeling across football was that it was a strange decision.

The Portuguese had just taken Forest from a relegation battle to European qualification, their first time in Europe in 30 years, and Evangelos Marinakis had rewarded him with a contract extension and then pulled the rug from underneath him before the summer was out. It was like a club making a mess of something that didn’t need to be touched.

And six months on, it looks worse than that.

Nuno has hired lawyers and is now in a formal legal dispute with Forest over his dismissal. The exact terms haven’t been made public, but The Athletic, which broke the story, described it as an ‘acrimonious matter’ with bad feeling on both sides.

Given what’s known about how it ended at the City Ground, that’s not hard to believe.

The manager had been on a reported £3.5 million per season, though sources suggest his actual package across the three-year deal was closer to £10 million in total. He was sacked 75 days after signing that contract, given no real chance to turn three poor results around, and the reason behind it all points at Edu Gaspar.

The former Arsenal technical director had been brought in as Forest’s Global Head of Football in the summer, and by all accounts he and Nuno clashed from their very first meeting. The disagreements were mainly over signings, over who controlled what, and over the basic question of who the manager actually was at the club.

Marinakis, who’d trusted Nuno enough to hand him a new deal just weeks before Edu arrived, sided with his new appointment when the results didn’t come quickly enough. Nuno was out, and Edu, in one of the more interesting developments to this whole saga, has also reportedly been shown the door as Forest’s board works out how to untangle the mess his arrival created.

The club, meanwhile, are now on their fourth manager of the campaign.

Nuno was out of work for exactly 18 days before West Ham came calling. He took the job on September 27, on £3.5 million per season, and inherited a side that was bottom of the Premier League and looking every inch a club heading back to the Championship. What he’s done since is simply one of the more impressive managerial turnarounds in the division this season.

The Hammers have won four of their last ten games, moved out of the bottom three and now sit 18th on 28 points, level with Forest and separated by goal difference. Tottenham are one point ahead of both in 16th. Leeds, currently 15th, lead the group by three points with nine games to go. That’s not even the interesting part.

Nuno is fighting Forest in the courts while at the same time fighting them in the league table. The club that sacked him after three games, the club his lawyers are currently pursuing for what is believed to be a substantial sum, is sitting directly alongside his West Ham side in the relegation zone, separated only by goal difference.

If things stay tight, one of them is going down. And Nuno, week by week, is doing everything in his power to make sure it isn’t him.

Forest’s season has been the kind that makes you wonder whether the club has anyone left who remembers what stability looks like; Ange Postecoglou replaced Nuno in September and lasted until December, Sean Dyche came in and was gone within eight weeks. Vitor Pereira is the fourth man to sit in the dugout this season, and while he steadied things for a while, results have slipped again at a time they matter most.

Forest have taken nine points from their last seven games. Interestingly, the 52-year-old also managed Wolves and Tottenham, Forest’s fellow relegation candidates. That of the Wolverhampton-based club might be excusable but he was sacked by Spurs in November 2021 after just four months in charge, in circumstances that felt rushed even then.

If West Ham stay up and both Forest and Tottenham go down, Nuno will have beaten three of his former clubs to survival while suing one of them at the same time. There is no manual for that kind of scenario.

What’s made West Ham’s revival believable is that it hasn’t relied on luck or a soft run of fixtures. The Hammers have beaten Everton, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth in recent weeks, and their defensive numbers under Nuno are better than they were under Graham Potter, who was shown the door in early September. West Ham look like a side that knows what it’s doing now. Whether that’s enough with nine games to go is another question.