Nottingham Forest often conduct themselves like a Premier League establishment these days, but every now and then, something happens to leave fans completely scratching their heads.
In the summer of 2022, Forest won promotion but then saw five loan players return to their parent clubs, Brice Samba and Lewis Grabban also leave, and Evangelos Marinakis splurged on 23 new players.
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Ultimately, the spending spree worked – kind of! Forest stayed in the Premier League and haven’t been out of it since, although the following season the club were deducted four points following a financial breach.
Now, four years on from that eventful summer, Forest appear to still be counting the cost of one of the players signed during that period.
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Paul Taylor delivers Omar Richards claim
In the summer of 2022, Forest parted with £8 million to sign Omar Richards from Bayern Munich as Steve Cooper looked to bolster his full-back ranks.
However, shortly after arriving, it emerged that he’d been signed despite having a fractured shin, with Marinakis fuming at the fact it’d not been picked up during the medical.
After Richards had recovered from that leg break, he required hernia surgery, and his first year at Forest proved nothing short of a nightmare.
Now, Taylor has surprisingly said in his column for The Athletic that Richards was handed a new deal that took him to a five-year contract instead of four.
It’s not clear when this extension was signed, but it does explain exactly why he was included on the list of retained players released by the club yesterday.
Taylor believes the club may have taken this decision to preserve his value, although that seems nonsensical, or to spread the cost of his deal over a longer term to aid with PSR restrictions in the future.
Richards has spent the last two seasons on loan with Rio Ave, and before that, he spent a year with Olympiacos, where he won the UEFA Conference League.
Forest must now look to move Richards on again, although given that he’s been to Greece and Portugal in the last three years, the chances of a club buying him do feel slim.
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Intriguingly, Forest do have a requirement for a full-back, but it does definitely feel as though this will be the summer when the Reds do look to try and cash in.
Richards deserves sympathy to a certain degree, and hopefully, he can find a move to a club where he can rediscover himself and kick-start his career once again.
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