Nottingham Forest top goalscorers lists have a habit of surprising people. Ask a Forest supporter to name the club’s record marksman and the guesses usually start in the Brian Clough era, with Birtles or Robertson or Nigel Clough. The right answer arrived at the City Ground in 1898, played in an era of heavy leather and heavier pitches, and set a mark that has now stood for well over a century. Here is the all-time list, and the modern names chipping away at the bottom of it.
Nottingham Forest top goalscorers: the all-time top five
- Grenville Morris — 217 goals, 1898-1913
- Nigel Clough — 131 goals, 1984-1993
- Wally Ardron — 124 goals, 1949-1955
- Johnny Dent — 122 goals, 1929-1936
- Ian Storey-Moore — 118 goals, 1962-1972
A word of caution before anyone takes those figures to the pub. Club records from the Victorian and Edwardian periods were kept less rigorously than they are now, and different reference works disagree by a goal or two depending on how they treat wartime and abandoned fixtures. The order, though, is not in dispute.
Grenville Morris: the record that will not move
Morris was a Welsh inside-forward signed from Swindon Town in 1898, and he spent 15 years at Forest at a time when the club were a First Division side without ever being a fashionable one. He scored 217 times, captained the side, won 21 caps for Wales and was still playing top-flight football into his late thirties.
To put the number in context: no Forest player has come within 80 goals of it in more than 110 years, and nobody in the current squad has scored a quarter as many for the club. In an age when a striker at a mid-table Premier League side is sold long before he reaches 100, it is the sort of record that is effectively permanent.
Nigel Clough: the closest anyone has come
Second on the list is the one name that carries a little extra weight around the City Ground. Nigel Clough scored 131 goals in nine years under his father, playing as a deep, clever centre-forward who dropped off the front line long before that was standard.
He scored twice from the penalty spot in the 1989 League Cup final and was central to the second great Forest side of the Clough years — the one built on Stuart Pearce, Des Walker and Steve Hodge rather than the European champions of a decade earlier. The full arc of that period is set out in our account of the Brian Clough era at Nottingham Forest.
Wally Ardron and the best single season
If the all-time list belongs to Morris, the single-season record belongs to Wally Ardron. Signed from Rotherham United when he was already 30, Ardron scored 36 league goals in 1950/51 as Forest won the Third Division South title — a club record for a single campaign that has not been threatened since, and one set at an age when most forwards are winding down. He finished with 124 in six seasons.
Johnny Dent’s 122 came in the 1930s, when Forest were a Second Division club, and Ian Storey-Moore’s 118 in the 1960s made him the last genuinely great Forest forward before Clough arrived. Storey-Moore’s move to Manchester United in 1972 remains one of the strangest transfer stories in English football, and it left the club without a marquee attacker until the European Cup side assembled itself.
The European Cup winners on the list
The forwards most Forest fans think of first sit just below that top five. Garry Birtles, across two spells, finished on close to 100 goals, including the ones that dragged Forest through Europe in 1979. John Robertson, nominally a winger, ended up not far behind, and his goals-to-assists balance in that side would look absurd on a modern data sheet.
Trevor Francis scored fewer than either — his Forest career lasted three years — but one of them was the header in Munich. That story is told in full in our piece on Forest’s back-to-back European Cups, and most of these names turn up again in our all-time Nottingham Forest XI.
One outlier deserves a mention. Stuart Pearce scored 88 goals for Forest from left-back, a total that would put him inside the club’s top 15 forwards and which no Forest defender has gone near. Free-kicks and penalties account for plenty of them; the fact he took both says as much about the man as any of it.
Where the modern Reds stand
Nobody in the current squad is going to trouble the top five, but the Premier League era has produced its own benchmarks. Chris Wood’s 20 league goals in 2024/25 — a season that ended with him third in the Golden Boot race — were the most by a Forest player in a Premier League campaign since Stan Collymore’s 22 in 1994/95. At 34, and now sharing a forward line with Liam Delap, Arnaud Kalimuendo and Igor Jesus, Wood is Forest’s leading scorer of the modern era by some distance; his route to the City Ground is covered in our Chris Wood profile.
Behind him, Lewis Grabban and Britt Assombalonga each cleared 40 in the Championship years, and Brennan Johnson’s 2021/22 promotion season remains the most productive by a Forest academy graduate in decades.
What the list really shows is how the game has changed. Four of the top five spent at least six years at the club; Morris gave it 15. Oliver Glasner’s squad, assembled for roughly £101m across a single summer window, is built on a different logic entirely — and that, more than anything a striker does on a Saturday, is why Grenville Morris is likely to stay top of this list for as long as there is a Nottingham Forest.
For the club’s own historical records and honours, see Nottingham Forest’s official website, and our guide to every major trophy the Reds have won.
