It is one of the most recognisable crests in English football, and one of the few that has barely changed in half a century. The Nottingham Forest badge is a stylised tree standing over the rippling water of the River Trent, with two gold stars above it that no amount of money can buy. Here is what every element of it actually means, and how a design competition won by a local lecturer gave the Reds an identity that has outlasted managers, owners and eras.
What is on the Nottingham Forest badge?
Strip it back and the crest has four components, each doing a job.
The tree. The obvious one, and the literal one. Forest are named after Sherwood Forest — the club was founded in 1865 by a group of men who met at the Clinton Arms on Shakespeare Street — and the single stylised tree at the centre of the badge is the club’s name drawn rather than written. It is also the root of the nickname, which we unpack in full in our guide to why Forest are called the Tricky Trees.
The wavy lines. Beneath the trunk sit three white waves. They are the River Trent, the river that gives the City Ground its address and its atmosphere, and which separates Forest’s home from Notts County’s on the opposite bank. Very few clubs put their geography on their shirt this directly.
The Garibaldi red. The background colour is not a design choice so much as an inheritance. Forest have worn red since their earliest days, a shade named after the red-shirted followers of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi — the story is told properly in our piece on what Garibaldi red actually means.
The club name. “Nottingham Forest F.C.” arcs around the tree in white. No Latin motto, no shield, no lions. For a club with Forest’s history, the restraint is the point.
The two stars above the crest
The gold stars that sit above the badge on the shirt are the part that stops opposition supporters in their tracks, and they are the simplest element to explain: one for each European Cup.
Forest won the trophy in 1979, beating Malmo in Munich, and retained it in 1980 against Hamburg in Madrid — a two-year run under Brian Clough and Peter Taylor that remains the most improbable achievement in the history of English club football, told in full in our account of the 1979 and 1980 European Cups. A club that had been in the Second Division in 1977 was champion of Europe twice by 1980.
Those two stars are the reason Forest supporters can be relaxed about almost any argument. They are also, bluntly, two more than most of the Premier League can display. The rest of the trophy cabinet is listed in our rundown of every Nottingham Forest honour.
Where the current badge came from
For most of the club’s first century, Forest did not have a crest of their own in the modern sense. Like a number of English clubs of the era, they used the coat of arms of their city — Nottingham’s own arms, complete with castle and stags — on the shirt for big occasions, and often played with no badge at all.
That changed in the mid-1970s. The club ran a public competition to find a permanent emblem, and the winning entry is credited to David Lewis, a lecturer at what was then Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham. His design — tree, river, arc of text — was adopted in 1974 and has been worn, with only minor refinements to line weight and typeface, ever since.
The timing could hardly have been better. Clough arrived in January 1975, the year after the badge was introduced. Everything that followed — promotion in 1977, the First Division title in 1978, the two European Cups, the League Cups — was won with that tree on the chest. A crest designed by a local lecturer for a mid-table Second Division side became, within five years, the emblem of the best team in Europe.
Why the badge has never been modernised
Plenty of English clubs have spent the past two decades rebranding: flattening their crests for digital use, dropping the year of founding, stripping out detail so the logo works at 16 pixels on a phone screen. Forest have essentially left theirs alone.
Part of that is practical. The design was already simple — a single motif, two colours, no heraldic clutter — so it needed none of the tidying that more ornate badges required. Part of it is that the crest is bound up with the greatest period any English club outside the biggest cities has ever had, and there is no version of “refreshing” it that would survive contact with the Trent End.
It has been through the ownership of Nigel Doughty and then Evangelos Marinakis, through the Premier League, thirteen years in the Championship and back again, and through a summer of change that brought Oliver Glasner in as head coach. The badge outlasts all of it. That is rather the idea.
The badge on the 2026/27 shirt
Today’s Forest shirt carries the crest in the traditional position on the left breast with the two stars above it, as it has for four decades. Ryan Yates captains the side wearing it, and Glasner’s squad go into the autumn still chasing a first win of the season after the 2-2 draw at Liverpool and a goalless afternoon against Tottenham Hotspur at the City Ground.
Forms come and go. The tree, the river and the two stars do not.
Club history, honours and official crest usage are published by the club on the official Nottingham Forest website, with European Cup records held by UEFA.
