During the World Cup, Nottingham Forest announced that Elliot Anderson had signed for Manchester City for £116 million.
In fairness, it was the worst-kept secret in football, with City holding an interest in Anderson way before he was strutting his stuff for England in the United States.
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Anderson signed for Forest for £35 million from Newcastle in the summer of 2024, with Odysseas Vlachodimos heading to St James’ Park as a makeweight for £20 million.
In two years, he helped Forest qualify for the Europa League and then reach the semi-finals, with his form alerting a number of clubs towards his suitability.
Now, Forest have received a one-off payment of £116 million for the services of Anderson, but just how much of that will the Reds have to spend?
We’ve taken a look…
How much of the Elliot Anderson money Nottingham Forest can spend
There used to be a time when selling a player for £116 million meant that the budget instantly increased and although that will be the case to a certain extent, Forest will be stopped from a spending spree.
That is because all Premier League clubs now have PSR and SCR parameters to work within, and Evangelos Marinakis will still have to cut the club’s cloth accordingly.
We sat down with football finance expert Adam Williams in the aftermath of the World Cup to discuss the sale of Anderson and just how much Forest can expect to spend of the transfer fee received.
Williams exclusively told Nottingham Forest News: Anderson’s amortised book value at the point of sale was about £21m, so you deduct that from the £116m to work out the profit for SCR purposes. So that’s £95m of profit or thereabouts which goes into your SCR calculation, both at UEFA and Premier League level.
“You take a three-year average on player sale profits under both sets of rules, so the Anderson deal effectively adds about £31.5m to their revenue for the purposes of their Squad Cost Ratio over the next three years.
“In terms of how much of that numerator they can actually reinvest, it’s difficult to say because the accounts for football clubs are always running on a one-year delay. The latest financial statements we have for Forest are from 2024-25. And there is an extra caveat in that most experts were baffled by Forest managing to stay within the limit of UEFA’s Football Earnings test, which limits losses to about €60m over three years – and this is a separate test from SCR, under which Forest received a small fine. That suggests we’re going to get something surprising in the results, which makes it tough to say with much certainty how much headroom they are going to have and, by extension, how much of the Anderson fee they can reinvest.
“But the overspend under SCR was only minimal, hence the very small fine. To me, I instinctively think that means they’ll have the headroom to reinvest most of the Anderson fee, if that’s the route Marinakis chooses to go down. The benefit of the new Premier League SCR system is that you can have some overspill in one year if you make up for it in the next. The difficulty will be balancing the re-investment with keeping costs relatively disciplined ahead of any potential return to Europe, where the SCR limit is lower. That is the dance that Forest, who could finish anywhere next season, have to perform.”
Forest will have to make sure they’re still frugal in the transfer market; however, there will be room, it seems, for one or two stellar recruits.
Lucas Bergvall has been linked with Forest from Tottenham, and he definitely won’t come cheap should the club try to land him.
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The other links so far include Ousmane Diomande, who could cost almost £50 million, but other than that, the rumours have suggested Forest will remain sensible.
Anderson’s sale will do wonders for the club’s coffers, but in this era of SCR, it’s positive that Forest appear to be remaining relatively sensible during the first transfer window since Oliver Glasner arrived at the club.
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