The Dan Ndoye Nottingham Forest story spent most of the summer pointing towards the exit door. By the time the window reached its final hours, it was pointing the other way entirely: of everyone at the City Ground, the Switzerland forward was the one man the Reds simply would not discuss. Roma asked the question in the closing days before Tuesday’s 11pm cut-off, and the answer that came back from Trentside could not have been blunter: he was untouchable. For a squad that has been rebuilt twice over in 12 months, that single word tells you almost everything about how quickly Ndoye’s standing under Oliver Glasner has changed.
The Dan Ndoye Nottingham Forest stance, in one word
According to Sport Witness, Roma “requested information” about Ndoye in the days before the window shut, a natural enough enquiry given the earlier chatter about a possible return to Italian football. Forest’s response, as reported by the Nottingham Post, was immediate and unambiguous. The 25-year-old was described as “untouchable” to any club thinking of trying its luck before the deadline.
That is not a club playing hard to get. It is a club that had already done its arithmetic and knew exactly which pieces it could afford to lose. Forest were prepared to sanction loan exits for Morato and Zach Abbott, both of which the club confirmed on deadline day, happy to let Omari Hutchinson join AC Milan on loan, and open to offers for Arnaud Kalimuendo amid reported interest from Eintracht Frankfurt and Como. Ndoye sat in a different category altogether.
Twelve months that changed the argument
Rewind to the spring and the mood around Ndoye was very different. Forest paid Bologna a fee in the region of £34 million for him a year ago, and his first season Trentside was hard going. The pace of the Premier League, a wide role that kept shifting and a forward line that kept growing all conspired against him, and by the back end of the campaign the speculation about a departure had become a steady hum rather than the occasional whisper.
Ndoye himself dealt with it the way most players do – politely, and by pointing at his contract. “Right now, I’m just proud that we finished the season successfully. But now the World Cup is coming up. It’s a big goal for me,” he said before representing Switzerland at this summer’s tournament. “We’ll see what happens after that. I have a contract with Nottingham until 2030 and I’m fully focused on that.”
That 2030 deal is the quiet detail underpinning everything. Forest were never negotiating from a position of weakness. A player with four years still to run, bought for a substantial fee, who has just started the season in the head coach’s first-choice attacking midfield pairing, is not somebody a club sells on the last day of a window because a bigger name in Serie A has made a phone call.
Why Glasner wanted him nowhere near the exit
Glasner has used Ndoye as one of his two No.10s, the roles that sit behind the striker in the head coach’s system, and he has done so from the off. Ndoye started both of Forest’s opening Premier League fixtures and came off the bench in the Carabao Cup tie against Leeds United. Alongside Morgan Gibbs-White, he has been the first name written into that part of the team sheet.
The opening day did little to advertise the point. Forest lost 1-0 at home to Leeds and Ndoye, like most of the side, was peripheral. Anfield was the correction. He opened the scoring as the Reds took a 2-2 draw at Liverpool, with Gibbs-White adding the second from the penalty spot – the first genuine sign that Glasner’s ideas were landing in a competitive fixture rather than just on the training pitch.
One goal does not settle a reputation, but it does settle a question of timing. Selling a player 72 hours after he has scored the goal that got your season moving, in a position where you are already short, would have been an odd piece of business by any standard.
Forest were buying wingers, not selling them
The clearest evidence that Ndoye was going nowhere is what Forest were doing at the other end of the market. The Reds spent the final stretch of the window trying to add to their wide and attacking-midfield options, not thin them out. An opening £10 million bid for Newcastle United’s Jacob Murphy was turned down over the weekend, and as deadline day wore on, the Daily Mail reported that a second offer worth £15m had also been rejected. Murphy, in the final year of his contract at St James’ Park, was wanted precisely because he could fill in at wing-back or in one of those two No.10 berths.
At the same time, Omari Hutchinson – the club’s former record signing – was completing a loan move to AC Milan with a reported €40m (£34m) option to buy attached, having managed just a single substitute appearance this season. That exit left the Forest attack lighter, not heavier. Add a rejected bid for a wide man to a wide man leaving on loan, and the idea of also waving off the player who had just scored at Anfield becomes untenable.
Glasner’s three-in, three-out maths
The head coach had set the terms himself after the Liverpool game. “Let’s see, if we have definitely one, potentially two and probably three signings, it would just make sense if we have definitely one, potentially two, probably three players who will leave us,” Glasner said, as reported by the Nottingham Post.
Forest had already added five senior players over the summer – Xaver Schlager, Ousmane Diomande, Steven Benda, club-record signing Liam Delap and, on the Monday, Daniel Munoz, whose £22m switch from Crystal Palace was confirmed on an initial three-year deal. With that many additions, outgoings were always going to be part of the endgame. The question was only ever which ones, and the answer never included Ndoye.
The other targets tell their own story about how tight the market got. Forest looked at midfielders and got nowhere with Everton’s Harrison Armstrong or Liverpool’s Trey Nyoni, with Corinthians’ Andre and Barcelona’s Marc Casado among the other names in the frame, while a late push for a goalkeeper was floated as a possibility amid links to Giorgi Mamardashvili and Dean Henderson. When incomings are that hard to land, keeping what you already have becomes the most valuable transfer business available.
What it means for the Reds now
Ndoye went into the closing hours of the window as something he was not in May: a protected asset. Glasner rates him, has picked him in every competitive game so far, and has just watched him score at Anfield. The attacking group around him – Chris Wood, Igor Jesus, Delap, Callum Hudson-Odoi, James McAtee and Gibbs-White, with Kalimuendo’s own future subject to that reported interest from Frankfurt and Como – is deep in bodies but still settling into a shape, and Ndoye is one of the few in it with his role already defined.
The pressure that comes with that is real enough. Being untouchable in September is a compliment; it is also an expectation. His compatriot Stephane Henchoz issued a warning about what English football demands of him earlier in the window, and a £34m winger in his second season is no longer a work in progress in the eyes of a City Ground crowd. But after a first year that never quite took off, Ndoye now has the two things that matter most to a player trying to rebuild a reputation: a coach who trusts him, and a club that, when a Serie A side came asking, would not even take the call.
