Nottingham Forest record signings is a list that has been rewritten more often in the last four years than in the previous forty, and on Thursday it changed again. Liam Delap’s arrival from Chelsea on a five-year deal took the Reds past their previous high-water mark and confirmed something Forest supporters have been getting used to since promotion: this is a club that now shops in the same aisles as the clubs it is trying to catch.
Below is where every one of the big ones sits. One caveat first, and it matters: Forest, like almost every English club, do not disclose transfer fees. Every figure here is the widely reported figure, and reported figures routinely disagree with each other by several million because of how add-ons and instalments are counted.
The top 10 Nottingham Forest record signings
- Liam Delap — Chelsea, August 2026, reported £45m–£50m
- Omari Hutchinson — Ipswich Town, 2025, reported £37.5m
- Dan Ndoye — Bologna, 2025, reported £37m
- Elliot Anderson — Newcastle United, 2024, reported £35m
- Ousmane Diomande — Sporting CP, 2026, reported £34.3m
- Ibrahim Sangaré — PSV Eindhoven, 2023, reported £30m
- James McAtee — Manchester City, 2025, reported £30m
- Arnaud Kalimuendo — Rennes, 2025, reported £26m
- Morgan Gibbs-White — Wolves, 2022, reported £25m rising to £42.5m
- Taiwo Awoniyi — Union Berlin, 2022, reported £17.5m
Nine of those ten deals were struck in the last four years. That is the whole story of the Evangelos Marinakis era compressed into a table.
How Liam Delap became Forest’s record signing
Delap, 23, signed a five-year contract at the City Ground on 27 August 2026 after a difficult single season at Stamford Bridge. The Guardian reported the deal at £45m; Nottinghamshire Live put it closer to £50m. Both are right, in the way transfer fees are usually right — one number is the guaranteed sum, the other is what the deal is worth if everything lands.
He will wear the No 19 and joins a striking department that already contained Chris Wood, Igor Jesus and Arnaud Kalimuendo, which is why the question of who leads Oliver Glasner’s line is not as simple as the price tag suggests. The full detail of the transfer is in our club-record signing report.
The Morgan Gibbs-White asterisk
Any honest version of this list needs a footnote next to No 9. When Gibbs-White arrived from Wolves in August 2022, the deal was reported at an initial £25m with add-ons that could take it to £42.5m — a figure described at the time as a club record. Depending on which of those two numbers you use, and how many of the add-ons have actually triggered, Gibbs-White has a decent claim to having sat at or near the top of this list for the last four years.
That is the trouble with ranking transfers by fee. Delap’s move is unambiguously the biggest guaranteed outlay in Forest’s history. Whether it is the most expensive player the club has ever bought, all instalments counted, is a question only the accounts departments at Trentside and Molineux can settle.
What the list says about Forest’s transfer strategy
Three patterns jump out.
Forest buy young. Delap is 23. Hutchinson, Ndoye, Anderson, Diomande and McAtee were all in their early twenties when they signed. Only Wood, bought at 31, seriously breaks the pattern, and he was bought to do a specific job rather than to be resold.
Forest buy from the Premier League and from the second tier of Europe. Chelsea, Ipswich, Newcastle, Manchester City, Wolves on one side; PSV, Bologna, Sporting CP, Rennes and Union Berlin on the other. It is a deliberate split — proven English-league adaptation on one hand, undervalued continental production lines on the other.
Forest are prepared to be wrong in public. Sangaré at a reported £30m has not been a straightforward success. Awoniyi’s Forest career, which began with a club-record fee, ended with a move to Coventry City this summer after his goals dried up. A club that spends at this level accepts that some of it will not work, and Forest have absorbed those misses without changing the approach.
The other side of the ledger: Forest’s record sales
The spending only makes sense next to the selling, and this is where Forest have been genuinely exceptional. Elliot Anderson, bought for a reported £35m in 2024, joined Manchester City this summer in a deal reported at around £116m — comfortably the biggest fee the club has ever received, and a profit that funds several of the signings above.
Before him, Brennan Johnson’s move to Tottenham Hotspur in 2023 and Anthony Elanga’s departure to Newcastle United in 2025 were both reported in the tens of millions. Forest have repeatedly turned academy graduates and mid-price recruits into nine-figure and near-nine-figure assets, which is the only sustainable way a club of Forest’s size can keep making the kind of signing Delap represents.
Before the modern era
It was not always like this. For most of the club’s post-Clough history, a Forest transfer record was a modest thing: Stan Collymore’s arrival from Southend United in 1993 and Pierre van Hooijdonk’s move from Celtic in 1997 were the sort of deals that counted as blockbusters at the City Ground, and both look quaint against a £45m striker. Even Forest’s first season back in the Premier League in 2022/23, when more than twenty players arrived in a single summer, was built mostly on loans, frees and single-figure fees.
Four years on, the Reds have a squad in which the record signing plays alongside four other players who each cost more than £25m. Delap will get his first look at what that expectation feels like at Anfield on Saturday — the details are in our Liverpool vs Nottingham Forest preview.
Who is Nottingham Forest’s record signing?
Liam Delap, signed from Chelsea in August 2026 for a fee reported between £45m and £50m. He replaced Morgan Gibbs-White, whose 2022 move from Wolves was reported at an initial £25m rising to £42.5m, at the top of the list.
For every twist between now and the deadline, follow our Nottingham Forest news and transfer coverage.
