The Nottingham Forest unbeaten run is the sort of statistic that sounds like a misprint. Forty-two First Division matches without defeat, set by a newly promoted side, and it stood as an English record for 26 years. Nearly half a century on it remains the single most remarkable thing a Forest team has done in the league, and it is worth understanding properly rather than just as a number on a pub quiz sheet.
When did the Nottingham Forest unbeaten run start?
It began, as these things tend to, with a defeat. Forest lost at Leeds United in November 1977 and then did not lose another league game until 9 December 1978. The run therefore stretched across two seasons: the back three-quarters of 1977/78 and the opening months of 1978/79.
The context is what makes it absurd. Forest had come up from the Second Division in 1976/77, promoted in third place, and were widely expected to spend 1977/78 fighting to stay up. Instead Brian Clough and Peter Taylor won the First Division title at the first attempt, finishing seven points clear of Liverpool in an era when a win was worth two points rather than three. That gap, translated into modern arithmetic, was a landslide.
It remains the only top-flight league championship in the club’s history — a fact that sits oddly alongside the two European Cups that followed, and one of the reasons the 1977/78 side is still the benchmark every Forest team is quietly measured against. You can see the full haul on our Nottingham Forest honours and trophies list.
The squad that built the unbeaten run
Clough and Taylor did not assemble a superteam. They assembled a very specific set of problems solved very cheaply, and then made the solutions fit together.
Peter Shilton arrived from Stoke City in September 1977 for a fee reported at the time as a world record for a goalkeeper, and the effect was immediate and measurable: Forest simply stopped conceding. In front of him, Kenny Burns had been signed from Birmingham City that summer as a forward with a reputation for trouble and was converted into a centre-half. He was named Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year for 1978. Shilton took the PFA Players’ Player award the same season. Both went to a club that had been in the second tier eighteen months earlier.
Larry Lloyd partnered Burns. Viv Anderson and Frank Clark took the full-back positions, with Anderson going on to become the first Black player to represent England in a full international in November 1978. John McGovern captained the side. Archie Gemmill and Ian Bowyer ran the midfield. John Robertson, a winger who looked like he had wandered in from the car park and could beat a full-back in a phone box, supplied most of what happened in the final third.
The whole thing is covered in more depth in our full story of Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest, and several of these names are unsurprisingly regulars in our all-time Forest greatest XI.
The League Cup, and an 18-year-old goalkeeper
The same season produced a second trophy and one of the better pieces of Forest folklore. Forest met Liverpool in the 1978 League Cup final, drew 0-0 at Wembley and won the replay 1-0 at Old Trafford through a Robertson penalty.
Shilton played in neither game. Having already appeared in the competition for Stoke that season, he was cup-tied, which left Clough to hand the shirt to Chris Woods — then 18 years old and yet to make a league appearance for the club. Woods kept a clean sheet at Wembley against the reigning European champions and went on to a long England career of his own.
How the Nottingham Forest unbeaten run ended
Liverpool ended it. On 9 December 1978, at Anfield, Forest lost 2-0 and the sequence stopped at 42 league matches. There is a certain neatness to that: Liverpool had been the team Forest displaced as champions, the team they beat in the League Cup final, and the team they knocked out of the European Cup in the first round that autumn.
The record then sat undisturbed for a very long time. Arsenal’s side of 2003/04 finally drew level on 42 and moved past it in August 2004, eventually reaching 49 games before Manchester United beat them in October that year. It is the only English league record of real substance that Forest have ever held, and losing it took a team that went a full season without defeat. Details of both runs sit in the Premier League’s official records.
What came next
What followed is the part everyone knows. Forest finished second in 1978/79, retained the League Cup, and won the European Cup in Munich against Malmö through a Trevor Francis header. Twelve months later they beat Hamburg 1-0 in Madrid, Robertson scoring, to retain it. Our piece on Forest’s back-to-back European Cups covers those two nights in full.
The unbeaten run is the bridge between the promotion and the trophies. It is the evidence that the 1977/78 title was not a fluke of a strange season, because a fluke does not last 42 games.
Could it happen again?
Not realistically, no — and that is not a comment on the current squad. The 42 came from a First Division of 22 clubs and a football economy where a promoted side could still buy the best goalkeeper in the country. Forty-two league games today is more than a full season.
The present-day Reds are working on something considerably more modest. Oliver Glasner, appointed in July 2026, is still waiting for his first league win of 2026/27 after a home defeat by Leeds United, a 2-2 draw at Liverpool and a goalless afternoon against Tottenham Hotspur at the City Ground. The trip to Aston Villa after the September international break is the next opportunity. Squad and fixture information is available via the club’s official website.
Forty-two is not a target. It is a reminder of what this club has been, on the banks of the Trent, when everything clicked at once.
