Oliver Glasner spent last season managing a team that finished one place and one point above the team he manages now. Crystal Palace took 45 points and came 15th. Nottingham Forest took 44 and came 16th. Each of them won 11 league games, and each won four of its nineteen at home.
Whatever was wrong at the City Ground last season was wrong at Selhurst Park at the same time, and one of those two teams was being coached by the man Forest have hired to fix it.
Glasner picks his first Forest team at 3pm on Saturday 22 August, at home to Leeds United, and the Forest vs Leeds odds at Betfair are for that game.
Glasner took charge of Palace in February 2024. In his first full season they finished 12th on 53 points and won the FA Cup, the first major trophy in the club’s history. They opened the next season by beating Liverpool on penalties for the Community Shield, and finished it 15th on 45 points, having won the Conference League.
Three trophies, two of them major, and a league finish that fell from 12th to 15th.
That is one shape a good season can have, and Glasner has produced it before. He won the Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt in 2021-22, with Frankfurt finishing 11th in the Bundesliga that year.
What he did in England, across two full seasons, was fill a cabinet while the league finish slipped.
Forest have already bought that trade once
Vitor Pereira took them to the Europa League semi-finals last season. The same squad finished 16th in the league under four managers in one season.
There are no European nights to split this season. That is the strongest reason to expect a better finish, and it has nothing to do with the new head coach. It also means a better finish will not tell anyone whether Glasner is working.
Forest’s other record
The BBC calls Forest’s four permanent managers in a single season a Premier League record. Nuno Espirito Santo started last season and was gone three games in, after 21 months in the job. Ange Postecoglou lasted 39 days, Sean Dyche 114, Pereira 133.
It took Glasner two full seasons and part of a third to build the Palace side that won those trophies. The first of those seasons produced 12th place and an FA Cup.
Leeds arrive as the counter-example
Daniel Farke has managed Leeds United since July 2023. He won the Championship with 100 points, took Leeds up, and kept them up in their first season back. Forest have had five head coaches in the past year. Farke has had three seasons at Elland Road.
This is not a claim about which is the better coach. Leeds have had bad months under Farke, and their supporters have argued about him throughout. It is a claim about what a board will sit through: Leeds found out what they had by leaving him in place long enough. That is the one thing Forest have not tried in a year, and Farke brings it to the City Ground on Saturday.
Why Saturday settles nothing
Morgan Gibbs-White scored 15 of Forest’s 48 league goals last season, too much for one player. Elliot Anderson has gone to Manchester City for a record fee, all factors that could impact betting offers ahead of the fixture.
What he does know is that his first home game is against a side who almost never won away. Leeds won two of their nineteen away matches last season, and each club won this fixture 3-1 on its own ground. Saturday will be read as a verdict on the new man. Beating that record at home would not tell anyone very much.
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