£3.5m player Nottingham Forest sold in 2019 is said to be training like Zinedine Zidane for Championship club

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Nottingham Forest’s pre-season is now fully underway with the Reds having now played their first friendly game.

Nuno Espirito Santo has had the first opportunity to look at some of the new faces to have landed at the City Ground over recent weeks.

The Reds have already been busy in the summer window with players both coming and going.

Evangelos Marinakis has been a busy man having offloaded a number of players to balance the books against PSR.

The likes of Orel Mangala and Moussa Niakhate have left the club in the early stages of the summer window.

However, there is a player who departed Forest back in 2019 who has now been compared to Zinedine Zidane.

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Former Nottingham Forest player training like Zinedine Zidane

There has been some significant changes over recent years at Forest with the Reds making their return to the top flight.

With that comes the need to improve the squad and that has saw considerable player turnover in the summer of 2021.

But one player who left well before any of this was midfielder Ben Osborn who left back in 2019 for Sheffield United in a deal worth £3.5m.

He has since departed the Blades and made the move to his boyhood club Derby County.

• READ MORE: ‘Amazing’ midfielder who rejected Nottingham Forest move back in 2022 has just signed for Leeds

Following his first few weeks at the club, his manager Paul Warne has had some glowing words to say about the 29-year-old midfielder.

“We’ve not seen Ben Osborn yet – we’ve seen him in training and he looks like Zidane!” he told the Derby website.

Quite a sensational comparison for a player who finds himself back playing in the Championship having only made 14 starts in the Premier League last season.

What Ben Osborn said about Forest after joining Derby

Plenty of time has now passed since Osborn departed the City Ground as he now finds himself just along the A52 at Derby.

The 29-year-old racked up an impressive 230 appearances for Forest during his time at the club and scored some memorable goals.

However, he has recently come out with some comments about his time with the Reds which may not have gone down with all of the Forest fans.

“As soon as I left Sheffield United, I found that Derby were interested,” Osborn said recently.

“It came out of the blue a little bit. I played here when I was really young, got released and went to the other side of the A52 for a number of years but still remained a Derby fan until I started getting close to the Forest first team. It all got a little muddled up then!