Nottingham Forest are two fixtures from Champions League football, and the man responsible for their position is their fourth head coach in six months. That is not a sentence that follows any conventional logic of club management, yet it is the situation the Guardian describes in a detailed account of how Vítor Pereira has transformed a club that, not long ago, appeared to be in freefall.
Pereira arrived into circumstances that could generously be called turbulent. Three managers had already come and gone within the same season before the Portuguese was appointed, and the reasonable expectation was that instability would compound itself. According to the Guardian, the opposite has happened. Pereira has found what the paper calls the right formula, galvanising a squad that might easily have fractured under the weight of so much disruption.
The most recent evidence came in a visit to Chelsea, where Forest won with eight changes to the starting lineup — a selection that raised eyebrows at the time, the Guardian reports, but which Pereira had designed with Thursday's Europa League semi-final second leg at Aston Villa in mind. Forest were ahead within two minutes and, by the hour mark, were out of sight. It was a third consecutive away win, and it moved the club a further step towards confirmed Premier League survival alongside their European ambitions.
That Forest are contending with both objectives simultaneously speaks to how much has shifted under Pereira's tenure. When the season began, survival was the more pressing concern. The Europa League run has since become something the club's supporters can scarcely have anticipated when the campaign was descending into managerial chaos. The semi-final second leg against Villa, with the tie's destination still to be determined, now stands as one of the more consequential fixtures in the club's recent history.
Forest's story carries an older resonance, of course. The club won back-to-back European Cups under Brian Clough in 1979 and 1980, a period that remains the summit of their history and one that supporters have waited a long time to see even distantly echoed. Whether Pereira's side can reach the Champions League — which would require not only progress against Villa but eventually winning the Europa League final — remains to be seen. What the Guardian's account makes clear is that the possibility is no longer an abstraction.
Pereira himself has worked across several countries during his career and arrived at the City Ground without a great deal of Premier League pedigree. That appears not to have mattered. The squad have responded, the results have followed, and a club that looked to be consuming itself with managerial upheaval now finds itself with something worth protecting. The second leg against Villa will tell a great deal about how far this version of Forest can go.