Nottingham Forest's gamble and Leicester's drop reveal football's wild extremes

Oliver Glasner inherits Nottingham Forest's high-stakes circus

Modern football rarely moves in logical steps. One day you are analyzing defensive block heights in elite venues, and the next you are watching a former Premier League champion stumble in League One while a three-time European champion drops to the third division. The line separating upper-echelon tactical execution from organizational meltdown has never felt thinner.

Take Nottingham Forest as the Premier League season begins. Last year, owner Evangelos Marinakis ran the City Ground like a high-speed coaching carousel. Forest started under Nuno Espirito Santo's low block, pivoted to Ange Postecoglou's high line, switched to Sean Dyche's aerial battle plan, and finally escaped relegation under Vitor Pereira.

This summer, Marinakis showed Pereira the door and hired Oliver Glasner. The Austrian arrives with genuine silverware on his record, having lifted the FA Cup, Community Shield, and Conference League during a stellar run at Crystal Palace. Glasner's disciplined 3-4-2-1 setup relies on tireless wing-backs, an intense central press, and direct vertical passing out of transitions.

Yet despite Glasner's credentials, bookmakers have installed Forest among the relegation favorites, citing their relentless managerial turnover as a recipe for chaos. Forest legend Stan Collymore thinks that assessment is dead wrong. Speaking to FourFourTwo, Collymore argued that the squad has the quality to finish anywhere from eighth to tenth if the board stays out of the manager's way.

"Seeing bookmakers list Forest among the favourites for relegation seems wildly inaccurate based on their squad depth," Collymore noted. "Unless there’s internal friction between Glasner and the hierarchy, the team operates at an eighth to 10th-place standard."

The focal point of Glasner's engine room is Morgan Gibbs-White. At 26, the midfielder is playing the best football of his career. Spurs tried to sign him last summer, while Aston Villa scouted him heavily before opting for Freiburg's 20-year-old prospect Johan Manzambi.

Gibbs-White chose to sign a new three-year contract at Forest, establishing himself as the cornerstone of Marinakis' project. His development over the past twelve months has answered long-standing questions about his work ethic. Early in his career, scouts questioned his defensive tracking, watching his displays swing between match-winning brilliance and invisible wandering.

Last season, Gibbs-White fixed those defensive metrics, dropping back to break up play and driving transitions with authority. He now possesses the complete skill set required to start for a top-six side. If Glasner can keep him focal to Forest's midfield transition, relegation talk will look foolish by autumn.

Leicester City's freefall proves spending without a plan is fatal

While Forest try to find stability under Glasner, their East Midlands neighbors present a cautionary tale of mismanaged ambition. Leicester City opened their League One season on Saturday with a grim 1-1 draw at Notts County.

A decade ago, King Power engineered the greatest fairytale in modern sports history, steering Leicester from the Championship to an unbelievable Premier League title. Today, after suffering back-to-back relegations, the club sits on the market with a £200m asking price.

The tragic death of owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a 2018 helicopter crash robbed Leicester of its guiding light. Under his son Aiyawatt, recruitment decisions deteriorated rapidly. Consecutive relegations from the Premier League and the Championship were not bad luck; they were the direct consequence of structural incompetence.

Fans often blame a drop in spending when a club collapses, but former Leicester striker Emile Heskey rejected that narrative. Heskey, now head of football development for the club's women's team, explained in FourFourTwo that King Power actually overspent recklessly, blowing their budget on short-term fixes and slamming into Profit and Sustainability limits.

"You can’t say they didn’t spend. That’s one of the things that fans say at a lot of clubs – ‘We’re not spending’. But no, they have spent, they’ve overspent, to try to get out of the hole."

Leicester's board threw massive contracts at aging players who offered no sell-on value and zero tactical flexibility. They bloated the payroll while failing to build a modern squad structure.

Heskey warned that finding a buyer won't happen overnight. Unwinding a bloated wage bill in League One is a brutal task, even for a club equipped with top-tier training grounds and a modern stadium. King Power gave Leicester fans memories for a lifetime, but their exit leaves behind a massive rebuilding job.

Alexandra Popp's third-tier homecoming exposes elite football's flaws

If Leicester's plight highlights financial mismanagement, Alexandra Popp's debut for Borussia Dortmund shows how deep emotional roots still run in the game. Popp is a titan of German football: 67 international goals, three Champions League titles, six Bundesliga crowns, and three German Footballer of the Year awards.

Yet at 35, she rejected a contract extension at Wolfsburg to join Borussia Dortmund in Germany's third division—the team she rooted for as a young girl in the Ruhr region. Her arrival triggered an unprecedented surge of enthusiasm.

Popp marked her debut against Arminia Bielefeld with two goals in a 3-0 victory at the historic Stadion Rote Erde. But the story was the crowd. An attendance of 4,572 filled the stands, more than doubling Dortmund's average home crowd from last season.

Season ticket sales nearly tripled from 600 to 1,700, while her replica jersey is currently outselling Serhou Guirassy, the men's team leading scorer over the past two campaigns. Popp's presence has transformed a lower-tier side into a regional event.

Tactically, Popp was operating several levels above everyone else on the pitch. Deployed as a central playmaker, she drifted into space wherever the match demanded, dropping deep to organize build-up play before surging forward to attack crosses. Late in the first half, she rose above Arminia's defense to hammer home a header with unstoppable power.

Arminia tried to slow her down with physical challenges, earning two yellow cards for heavy fouls. As Sky Sports reported, Popp laughed off questions about her position, explaining that she plays wherever the ball goes.

"Everywhere. No, I have to play on the 10. But I am a player when I see there is some space or we need to defend or something, I take my legs and I run back."

Yet there is a clear negative side to this romance. Borussia Dortmund deserves serious criticism for failing to establish a women's team until 2020. For one of Europe's wealthiest clubs to start their women's program in the seventh tier was an embarrassing institutional failure that forced them to play catch-up.

Last season, despite recording a staggering goal difference of over +100, Dortmund missed promotion by two points after dropping points to Arminia in April. Popp's three-year contract signals high ambition to reach the top tier quickly, but it highlights how much ground Dortmund lost through years of neglect.

Peter Crouch and the weird, lucrative reality of modern football media

Running alongside tactical rebuilds and lower-league homecomings is the commercial circus surrounding retired players. Former England striker Peter Crouch, who scored 22 goals in 42 caps before hanging up his boots in 2019, sits right at the center of this entertainment machine.

At 45, Crouch has built a lucrative second career out of self-deprecating comedy. His latest Paddy Power campaign, titled 'Why The Football Not?', sees him alongside Danny Dyer and Danny Murphy parodying football's strangest stories.

In the advert, Crouch recreates the American Beauty rose-petal bath scene in his underpants, floats over California vineyards in a hot-air balloon shaped like giant underpants, and hides behind trees near Middlesbrough's training ground in a reference to infamous scouting scandals.

"Just the other week, I was up in a hot air balloon, which was also designed like a pair of pants, in LA overlooking the California countryside – my life is very strange," Crouch told FourFourTwo. Speaking about his acting gigs, he admitted that embracing the absurdity keeps him connected to the game.

Crouch's antics illustrate how modern football monetizes nostalgia. Fans overwhelmed by corporate press statements and complex financial regulations find relief in a former England international making fun of himself in an oversized pair of pants.

From Oliver Glasner's tactical board at Forest to Leicester's bitter financial hangover, and from Alexandra Popp's third-tier crowds to Peter Crouch's California balloon rides, football in 2026 remains a wild, unpredictable mess. Tactical rigor explains how matches are decided, but these human stories explain why millions keep tuning in.