Nottingham Forest have spent a club record on a centre-forward this season, and the fee attached to Liam Delap is the sort of number that would have bought Brian Clough an entire squad. Which is worth remembering, because the striker who led the line in two European Cup finals cost the Reds roughly the price of a second-hand car. Garry Birtles Nottingham Forest is the story of a carpet fitter from a non-league side down the road who became, for about two years, one of the most feared forwards in Europe.
Who is Garry Birtles?
Garry Birtles was born in Nottingham on 27 July 1956 and was playing non-league football for Long Eaton United, fitting carpets during the week, when Forest scouts started turning up to watch him. He signed for his hometown club in December 1976 for a fee reported at around £2,000 — a rounding error even by the standards of the 1970s, and comfortably the best value for money in the entire history of Brian Clough’s transfer dealing at Nottingham Forest.
Then almost nothing happened. Birtles spent the best part of two years in the reserves while Forest won promotion and then the 1978 First Division title, with Peter Withe leading the line. When Withe left for Newcastle United, the manager did not go out and buy a replacement. He looked down the corridor instead.
The Liverpool night that changed everything
Birtles’s breakthrough came in the most absurd circumstances imaginable: September 1978, the European Cup first round, Forest drawn against Liverpool — the holders, and the best side in England for most of the decade — in the very first tie of their very first European campaign.
Clough handed the shirt to a forward with a handful of senior appearances to his name. Birtles scored the opening goal in a 2–0 win at the City Ground, had a hand in the second and spent 90 minutes making one of the great European defences look ordinary. Forest went through, and the run that followed is set out in full in our account of the 1979 and 1980 European Cups.
It is the purest example of what the Clough and Peter Taylor partnership actually did. They did not find a striker. They found a carpet fitter, waited two years, and then threw him at the European champions.
Two European Cups and a Wembley winner
What followed was a remarkable burst. Birtles finished 1978/79 as Forest’s leading scorer with more than 20 goals in all competitions, formed an understanding with John Robertson on the left that defenders never solved, and started the 1979 European Cup final in Munich, where Trevor Francis headed the only goal against Malmo.
He scored in the 1979 League Cup final win over Southampton at Wembley too, one of the four finals covered in our guide to Forest’s four League Cup finals, and he started the 1980 European Cup final in Madrid when Robertson’s finish beat Hamburg. Two European Cup finals, both won 1–0, with a non-league forward leading the line in each. The medals sit alongside the rest in our list of Nottingham Forest’s honours.
England came calling as well. Birtles won his first caps in 1980, at a point when he was arguably the most in-form centre-forward in the country.
The Manchester United move, and the goal that would not come
In October 1980, Manchester United paid a reported £1.25 million for him — a club record for them at the time, and one of the great pieces of selling in Forest’s history, as our look at Forest’s biggest sales makes clear. A player bought for £2,000 left for roughly 600 times the price.
Then came the strangest chapter of his career. At Old Trafford the goals simply stopped. Birtles went more than a year without scoring a league goal for United, a barren run that became one of English football’s standing punchlines and followed him around for the rest of his life. He was the same footballer — the movement, the link play, the willingness to run the channels all still there — in a side that did not play the way Forest played, and the confidence drained out of him in public, week after week.
Anyone tempted to treat that as a verdict on Birtles should count how many strikers before and since have moved for big money and stopped functioning. The lesson is about fit, not ability, and it is one Forest supporters have watched play out at both ends of the deal in our list of Forest’s record signings.
The homecoming
Forest brought him back in 1982 for a fraction of what they had banked, and the goals returned almost immediately. He was never quite the force of 1979 again — few players are, after eighteen months of that — but he gave the club several more productive seasons before moving on to Notts County and then Grimsby Town, winding down a career that had begun on a Long Eaton pitch in front of a few hundred people.
Across two spells at the City Ground he scored enough to sit high in our ranking of Forest’s all-time top goalscorers, and he did it in an era when First Division defences were allowed to do things to centre-forwards that would now carry a red card and a three-match ban.
Why Birtles still matters
Supporters of a certain age know Birtles better as a voice than a player now. He has spent years as a broadcaster and co-commentator on Forest games, and he remains one of the more honest analysts of his old club — a man who will say the uncomfortable thing about a performance and has enough medals to get away with it.
His real legacy is the reminder buried in that £2,000. Forest’s recruitment in 2026 is a different business entirely: Oliver Glasner has a squad assembled for well over £100 million this summer, and the pressure on a club-record striker to justify his fee is immediate and unforgiving. Clough’s Forest solved the same problem by promoting a carpet fitter and giving him two years to be ready.
Nobody is suggesting that is a transfer strategy in the modern Premier League. But the next time a Forest forward is struggling in front of goal, it is worth remembering that the last man to lead the line in a European Cup final for this club spent two seasons in the reserves first — and that the manager who eventually picked him, in a team built around Kenny Burns and the rest of that side, had waited on purpose.
European Cup final records are held by UEFA, England appearance records by England Football, and club history on the official Nottingham Forest website.
