Twenty-three years is a long time to be gone. The Nottingham Forest Premier League return that finally arrived on a Sunday afternoon at Wembley in May 2022 ended the longest top-flight absence any English European Cup winner has ever endured — an exile that took in two relegations, a collapse into the third tier, four failed play-off campaigns and a final-day heartbreak that still makes Reds supporters wince. Here is how Forest fell out of the top division, what the years in between actually looked like, and how the club climbed back.
The Nottingham Forest Premier League return, in numbers
Forest were relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 1998/99 season, finishing bottom of the table. They did not play top-flight football again until August 2022. In between sat 23 years and four different divisions’ worth of misery and recovery:
- 1999–2005: six seasons in the second tier
- 2005–2008: three seasons in League One, the third tier
- 2008–2022: 14 consecutive seasons in the Championship
- May 2022: promotion via the play-off final
For a club with two European Cups on its badge, it is a sequence that barely computes. The trophies from that era are all set out in our full list of Nottingham Forest honours, and the improbable run that won them is told in our account of the 1979 and 1980 European Cups.
How Forest fell out of the top flight
The decline was not one drop but a series of them. Forest were relegated in the inaugural Premier League season of 1992/93, the campaign in which Brian Clough retired after 18 years in charge. They bounced straight back up as Division One runners-up in 1994 and, remarkably, finished third in the Premier League the following season, qualifying for the UEFA Cup and reaching the quarter-finals in 1996.
That was the last high. Relegation followed in 1996/97, a second immediate promotion as Division One champions in 1997/98, and then the season that changed everything: 1998/99, a bottom-place finish, and the beginning of the long walk.
The nadir came in 2004/05. Forest were relegated from the Championship and became the first winners of the European Cup to fall into their own country’s third tier. A club that had beaten Malmo and Hamburg in successive finals spent three seasons in League One before Colin Calderwood’s side went up as runners-up in 2007/08.
Fourteen years, four play-off campaigns, no promotion
What followed was the strangest phase of the exile: Forest were rarely bad, and never quite good enough. Under Billy Davies they reached the play-off semi-finals in 2011 and lost to Swansea City, two years after Paul Hart’s side had gone out at the same stage to Sheffield United in 2003.
The cruellest of the lot came in 2020, when Forest went into the final day inside the play-off places, lost 4–1 at Stoke City and were overhauled on goal difference by Swansea, who won by the same scoreline at home to Reading. Ninety minutes cost the club a season.
Through all of it the City Ground kept filling up, and the ownership changed hands more than once — from Nigel Doughty to the Al-Hasawi family and then, in 2017, to Evangelos Marinakis, whose investment underwrote the eventual push.
2021/22: bottom of the table in September, promoted in May
The season that ended the wait began about as badly as a season can. Forest took one point from their opening seven Championship matches and sat 24th — dead last — when Steve Cooper was appointed in September 2021.
What happened next was the best run of form the club had produced in a generation. Cooper’s Forest climbed from bottom to fourth, knocked Arsenal and Leicester City out of the FA Cup along the way, and set up a play-off semi-final against Sheffield United. That tie went to penalties at the City Ground, and Forest won it.
The final, on 29 May 2022, was settled by the only goal of an unbearably tense afternoon: a Levi Colwill own goal inside the first half gave Forest a 1–0 win over Huddersfield Town. Twenty-three years, over.
What the return has actually delivered
Survival came first, and it was not comfortable. Forest stayed up in 2022/23 after a summer of unprecedented squad turnover, and again in 2023/24 despite a four-point deduction for a breach of the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules — a system we explain in our guide to how PSR works.
Then came the leap. A seventh-place finish in 2024/25 took Forest back into European competition for the first time since the 1990s and reframed what the club was for — no longer a side scrapping to stay up, but one expected to compete for the top half. There is no European football at the City Ground this season, but the ambition set in that campaign has not gone away.
Where Forest stand now
The current Reds are a different proposition again. Oliver Glasner arrived as head coach in July 2026, Ryan Yates captains the side, and a summer of roughly £101m of spending brought in Liam Delap, Ousmane Diomande, Daniel Munoz, Xaver Schlager and Steven Benda.
The start has been slow — two points from the opening three games, a 2–2 draw at Liverpool and a goalless afternoon against Tottenham Hotspur in which Neco Williams had a goal disallowed by VAR — and the first win of the campaign is still outstanding. But the context matters. Five years ago Forest were bottom of the Championship. The argument now is about where they finish in the Premier League, not whether they belong in it.
That is what 23 years buys you: a supporter base that does not take a single top-flight fixture for granted.
Season-by-season league records are published by the Premier League and the English Football League, with club history held on the official Nottingham Forest website.
