Football has become the country’s soap opera. It’s a point David Goldblatt makes in his new book Injury Time: it seems absurd to think now that in 2001, the BBC persuaded Uefa to delay kick-off of a Champions League tie between Liverpool and Barcelona so viewers could first find out who shot Phil Mitchell. By 2020, EastEnders was being bumped from its slot in the schedules for an FA Cup fifth-round tie between Liverpool and Chelsea. As the big television soaps have declined, it is football that has become the great national obsession, not just in terms of what happens on the pitch but also the endless politicking off it.
Nothing could exemplify that better than Sunday’s game at Selhurst Park, a curiously patchy and unsatisfactory draw played out in an atmosphere of fraught tetchiness. Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest are two very respectable clubs with fine traditions, but there is no great history between them.
If a Palace v Forest fixture resonates at all in the collective memory it is only for the series of FA Cup third-round meetings in 1991: it was after the first replay that Brian Clough laid out Roy Keane with a punch after an under hit backpass gave up an equaliser, and in the second, with Forest 3-0 up, that Clough substituted Steve Hodge for nobody, apparently to make a point about the ineffectiveness of Palace’s direct style, although it also damaged his relationship with the midfielder.
When the sides met at Selhurst Park on the final day of 2023-24 the mood was notably friendly, as fans of the clubs celebrated their survival together. Yet the buildup to this fixture on Sunday was full of bitterness and intrigue, with Palace blaming Forest for their demotion from the Europa League to the Conference League and Forest locked in what, to an outsider, appears a needless internecine dispute between manager and owner.
Nuno Espírito Santo, reiterating that he would never walk away from Forest, spoke of the need for him, the owner Evangelos Marinakis and Edu, the global head of football for Marinakis’s multiclub organisation, to clear the air for the good of the club. He himself, though, had spoken of there being no smoke without fire when asked on Friday about rumours that his job was under threat.
Whatever Nuno’s frustrations with Marinakis, his plaintive talk of how they no longer speak every day, they are as nothing beside those of Palace fans, who spent a healthy part of the buildup and game abusing him, his private habits and his appearance. Marinakis himself was not at Selhurst Park on Sunday.
It’s not just that Forest have taken Palace’s place in the Europa League, or that Marinakis wrote a letter to Uefa urging them to take action against Palace, it’s that Marinakis has a business relationship with John Textor, whose ownership of Lyon through Eagle Holdings along with his now-offloaded stake in Palace put them in breach of Uefa regulations. Textor appeared on the banner as a clown, juggling his various clubs. The outrage if Igor Jesus, signed by Forest for a very reasonable fee from one of Textor’s other clubs, Botafogo, had scored an injury-time winner would have been apocalyptic, a dramatic flourish too far. Perhaps fortunately for everybody, his effort pinged against the inside of the post.
Palace’s sense of grievance, of being punished for a technical breach that has since been resolved while actual multiclub groups use blind trusts as a workaround, is only heightened by the fact that Forest are themselves part of a multiclub model. That Olympiakos won the Greek league to qualify for Champions League meant the blind trust Forest had entered into was a needless bureaucratic contingency. The hostility of Palace fans, it was very noticeable, was directed at Marinakis rather than at Forest.
That in itself is telling, given it implies a distinction between the club and its owner and, perhaps, hints at a broader solidarity among fans, a sense of everybody being pawns in a rich man’s game. Certainly the focus on Marinakis and ownership feels like a departure. There probably were chants about Robert Maxwell when he owned Oxford and Derby in the 80s, but he was an unusually prominent public figure: however outspoken the likes of Bob Lord, Sam Longson and Peter Swales may have been, it wouldn’t even have occurred to opposing fans to direct sustained abuse in their direction. A game about players, having become a game about coaches, is now very clearly a game about owners and directors.
Which, of course, is great news for the drama; as shows from Dynasty to Succession have proved, there’s nothing quite so compelling as the machinations of people in suits. The grand soap opera goes on.
