The Nottingham Forest Crystal Palace transfer battle picked up a fourth front on Friday night. Get French Football News reported that Forest will rival Palace in the race to sign Auxerre’s Kevin Danois — the latest occasion this month on which the Reds and the club Oliver Glasner left in July have been reported to be reaching for the same player.
One shared target is coincidence. Four inside a fortnight, with a legal dispute running between the two clubs in the background and Glasner sitting in the home dugout at the City Ground this afternoon, starts to look like something closer to a pattern. Here is what the beat has actually reported, what Forest have already banked in this window, and how much of it should be taken at face value.
- Every player Forest and Palace have been linked with together this month
- Why Glasner’s arrival makes overlapping shortlists close to inevitable
- What the Reds have completed in this window — and what is still missing
- The case for caution, and what realistically happens before the deadline
Background: from Selhurst Park to the City Ground
Glasner was appointed Forest head coach in early July, arriving from Crystal Palace after a 2025-26 campaign in which the City Ground got through four head coaches and finished 16th. There is no European football to juggle this season, which the Austrian has openly framed as an advantage while he installs the 3-4-2-1 he used to such effect at Selhurst Park.
The window around him has been busy at both ends. Elliot Anderson’s £116m move to Manchester City on 2 July stands as the club-record sale, and the money has gone back into the spine: Xaver Schlager arrived on a free from RB Leipzig on 23 July, Ousmane Diomande signed from Sporting for £34.3m on 11 August, and goalkeeper Steven Benda joined on a free from Fulham on 15 August. Going the other way, Taiwo Awoniyi completed a move to Coventry City on 17 August — reported fees vary and no single figure has been confirmed — while David Carmo and Stefan Ortega joined Olympiacos, Willy Boly was released and Angus Gunn left for San Jose.
Glasner told Sky Sports last week that he has already identified more targets, and the Nottingham Post reported on Thursday that a further signing was “one step away” with midfield interest emerging behind it. On Friday afternoon the same paper reported that Forest had completed a further deal sanctioned by the head coach. In other words: the Reds are not finished, and neither, evidently, are Palace.
The Nottingham Forest Crystal Palace transfer collisions, name by name
Kevin Danois (Auxerre)
The freshest of them. Get French Football News reported on Friday evening that Forest will rival Palace for the Auxerre man. Neither club has commented, no bid has been reported, and the outlet frames it as a race rather than a deal — so treat it as a live link and nothing more. What makes it notable is not the player but the company: this is the fourth name in a fortnight to appear on both shortlists.
Nicolò Fagioli (Fiorentina)
Football Italia and Yahoo Sports both reported on Thursday that Forest and Palace are chasing the Fiorentina midfielder. We covered that one in full when it broke — see our piece on the Fagioli link and the Anderson-shaped hole it is meant to fill — and the logic is straightforward enough: replacing Anderson’s output from a deep midfield role has been the defining unsolved problem of Forest’s summer, and Palace are rebuilding a midfield of their own.
Lamine Camara
Read Crystal Palace, a Palace-supporting site, reported on Thursday that Camara was heading to Selhurst Park with Forest circling. That is a rival fan outlet reporting on its own club’s business, so the Forest end of it should carry the lighter weighting of the two — but it belongs in the sequence.
The unnamed captain
Inside Futbol reported on Friday afternoon that Forest had joined Palace in the hunt for a player recently named captain by his current club. The version of that report available on the beat does not name the player or attach a fee, so we are flagging it purely as evidence of the pattern rather than presenting it as a story in its own right. The same outlet also reported on Friday that Forest are “carefully considering” what bid to make for a target, and separately that the Reds have tempted a La Liga player with wages “more than double” what he currently earns. Neither player is identified.
Why the shortlists overlap — and why that is less sinister than it looks
The obvious explanation is the one in the dugout. A head coach who spent the previous two-and-a-bit seasons building a Palace squad to fit a 3-4-2-1 has arrived at a club playing the same shape, with a recruitment brief to fill the same slots: wing-backs with legs, a ball-carrier between the lines, a centre-forward who can press. He will have opinions about players Palace scouted, considered or rejected, and his new employers will have asked for them. Overlapping lists are not a conspiracy; they are what happens when a manager changes clubs mid-rebuild.
There is also a straightforward market explanation. Forest and Palace are two mid-table Premier League clubs with similar budgets, similar squad ages and a similar appetite for Ligue 1 and Serie A value. The pool of players who fit both profiles is not large. Every August, half a dozen clubs in that bracket end up chasing the same twenty names.
The caution, then, is this: none of the four links above is a confirmed bid, and only two of them name the player. Deadline-week transfer reporting runs hot, agents brief widely, and “Club A rival Club B” is the cheapest headline in football. Forest have said nothing publicly about any of them.
What is beyond dispute is that relations between the two clubs are not warm. As the Guardian noted in its season preview on Thursday, “Evangelos Marinakis has launched legal action against Crystal Palace after some of their fans produced a derogatory banner about the Forest owner” — a story we covered in detail earlier this week. Whatever the truth of the transfer links, the two clubs are already in each other’s business.
What happens between now and the deadline
Forest still need a centre-forward. Chris Wood is 34 and, as the Guardian put it, his “injury record and ageing body” raise questions about the New Zealander’s ability to lead the line for a full campaign; Igor Jesus and Arnaud Kalimuendo are the cover. That is why the Liam Delap link has refused to die, and why the striker slot, not midfield, is the likeliest place Forest spend big in the final week.
Behind that, the Dodô deal has been reported as all but agreed, and Glasner’s stated wish for two or three more bodies would leave room for one of the midfielders above. Expect at least one of these Palace-adjacent names to firm up or vanish entirely within days — deadline week does not do middle grounds.
And expect the framing to keep coming. With Glasner in charge, every Palace-linked player Forest are put near will be written as a tug-of-war, whether or not the two clubs are genuinely bidding against each other.
The verdict
Danois is a link, not a signing, and the same goes for the three names beside him. But the cluster is real, the cause is identifiable, and it tells you something useful about how Forest are recruiting under a head coach appointed in July: to a clear profile, in markets he already knows, for a system he has already built once. For the full picture of what the Reds still want before the window shuts, read our rundown of Glasner’s deadline-day plan.
