Ryan Yates is the Nottingham Forest captain, the last academy graduate standing in a first-team squad that has been rebuilt almost from scratch, and comfortably the most argued-about player at the City Ground. He was handed the armband in July 2026, a decision confirmed by the club at the start of Oliver Glasner’s first pre-season, and it capped a career that began with a Nottingham postcode and three loan spells in a single year. This is the full story of how the local lad became the leader of the Reds.
Ryan Yates: the basics
Yates is a central midfielder, born on 21 November 1997 in Nottingham, and he wears the number 22 shirt. At around 6ft 4in he is one of the tallest midfielders in the Premier League, which shapes almost everything about how he plays – a genuine aerial threat at both ends, awkward to play through, and a body Forest have leaned on in every phase of their climb from the Championship.
He has now made well over 200 appearances for the club, a figure no other member of the current squad comes close to. In a dressing room where the majority of the players arrived in the last three summers, that continuity is the whole point.
A Nottingham lad and three loans in one year
Yates came through the Forest academy, and for a long time it was not obvious he would come out the other side of it. Between 2018 and 2019 he was sent out on three separate loans in quick succession – to Shrewsbury Town in League One, to Notts County in League Two, and then to Scunthorpe United – the sort of itinerary that usually ends with a free transfer rather than a captaincy.
Instead it did exactly what loans are supposed to do. Yates came back harder, better at the ugly parts of the game, and used to being in teams where nobody was going to do his running for him. Lower-league football taught a tall, technically raw academy midfielder how to be useful, and it is the reason he survived a period at Forest when managers arrived and departed almost by the season.
From squad player to promotion regular
The turning point was the 2021-22 campaign. Forest began it bottom of the Championship and ended it at Wembley, and Yates was in the middle of it – part of the run that carried the Reds through the play-offs and back into the Premier League after 23 years away. He started the final. For a supporter who had grown up watching the club drift, being on that pitch was not a footnote to his career; it was the point of it.
What followed was harder. Promotion brought more than 30 new signings across two windows, and every one of them was, in theory, a threat to his place. Yates kept playing. He was a regular through both survival seasons, then through the seventh-place finish in 2024-25 that delivered European football to the City Ground for the first time in a generation. Players signed for eight figures came and went around him. He stayed.
Why Ryan Yates wears the armband
The club confirmed Yates as captain in July 2026, and the logic was not complicated. Forest had just lost Elliot Anderson to Manchester City, sold or released a swathe of senior players, and appointed a new head coach in Glasner. Somebody in that dressing room needed to be able to explain what the club is to a group of new arrivals, and only one player was qualified to do it.
It is worth being precise about what the armband means here, though, because Forest have two leaders and they do different jobs. Morgan Gibbs-White is the talisman – the player the team is built around, and one who has worn the armband himself at times. Yates is the captain: the standard-setter, the one who fronts up after a defeat like the opening-day loss to Leeds United rather than disappearing down the tunnel. Most successful sides have both. Forest have stopped pretending they need to be the same person.
Yates in Oliver Glasner’s Forest
Glasner’s preferred 3-4-2-1 asks a great deal of its central pair. They screen the back three, cover the ground the wing-backs vacate, and are expected to take the ball under pressure rather than launch it. That is a genuinely demanding profile, and Forest spent the summer of 2026 adding to the department – Xaver Schlager arrived on a free from RB Leipzig, James McAtee and Ibrahim Sangaré are both in the building, and Nicolás Domínguez remains an option.
Yates is not guaranteed to start every week in that company, and he would not claim otherwise. What he offers Glasner is a specific set of things the alternatives do not: set-piece presence at both ends, a duel-winner in a system that concedes some transitions by design, and a captain who can be dropped without becoming a problem. The full picture of who he is competing with is in our guide to the 2026-27 Forest squad numbers.
The Yates debate, honestly
No Forest player divides the fanbase quite like him. The case against is straightforward: in a squad assembled for close to a quarter of a billion pounds, a homegrown midfielder whose best attributes are physical is an easy target when the team is playing badly, and Yates has never been the man to unlock a low block.
The case for is that he has outlasted every single manager, sporting director and marquee signing who was supposedly going to replace him, across three divisions of football. Squads need players who can be the eleventh-best footballer on the pitch and still make the team better. Successive coaches with very different ideas have all arrived at the same conclusion about him, which is usually a sign the coaches are seeing something the debate is missing.
The bottom line
Ryan Yates is a Nottingham-born academy graduate who was loaned out three times in a year and is now the captain of a Premier League club with European pedigree and a trophy cabinet that still demands respect. He is not the best player at the City Ground and does not need to be. He is the one who has been there for all of it – and in a squad that changes shape every window, that is a job somebody has to do.
