Larry Lloyd arrived at Nottingham Forest as a centre-half other clubs had more or less finished with. He left five years later with two European Cups, a league championship and a permanent place in the most celebrated back line the City Ground has ever housed.
In a Forest side stacked with artists — John Robertson on the left, Trevor Francis in front of him, Peter Shilton behind — Lloyd was the granite. Brian Clough and Peter Taylor built plenty of beautiful things at Forest, but they knew exactly what the beautiful things were built on.
How Larry Lloyd ended up at the City Ground
Born in Bristol in October 1948, Lloyd started out at Bristol Rovers before Bill Shankly took him to Liverpool in 1969. He became Ron Yeats’ successor at Anfield and won the First Division title in 1972-73 and the UEFA Cup in the same season, earning three England caps under Sir Alf Ramsey along the way.
A big-money move to Coventry City in 1974 went sideways. Injury and a falling-out left him on the fringes at Highfield Road, and by the autumn of 1976 he was a 27-year-old former international with a reputation for being difficult and a career drifting.
Clough and Taylor, who made a habit of collecting exactly that sort of player, took him to the City Ground on loan in October 1976 and then signed him permanently for a fee reported at around £60,000. Forest were a Second Division club at the time. Within five years they were champions of Europe twice over.
The Kenny Burns partnership that won a title
Forest went up in 1977 and then did the thing that still sounds implausible when you say it out loud: they won the First Division at the first attempt, in 1977-78, as a newly promoted side.
The defence was the reason. Forest conceded just 24 goals in 42 league games that season, with Shilton behind a back four of Viv Anderson, Lloyd, Kenny Burns and Frank Clark. Burns, a converted centre-forward, was named Footballer of the Year; Lloyd was the old-fashioned stopper next to him, all elbows, positioning and noise.
It should not have worked. A brawler and a reformed striker is not a coaching-manual partnership. It worked because both men could read a game and because neither was remotely interested in being bullied. Forest added the League Cup in 1978 and set off on the unbeaten league run that would eventually stretch past 40 games.
Munich, Madrid and back-to-back European Cups
Then came the part that made them immortal. In Munich in May 1979, Forest beat Malmo 1-0 in the European Cup final, Trevor Francis heading in Robertson’s cross on the stroke of half-time. Lloyd and Burns saw the rest of it out.
Twelve months later, in Madrid, Forest did it again — 1-0 against Hamburg, Robertson scoring this time, and a rearguard performance that kept Kevin Keegan, then the reigning European Footballer of the Year, at arm’s length for 90 minutes. Forest also retained the League Cup in 1979. For a club that had been in the second tier three years earlier, it remains the most concentrated run of success in English football history, and you can read the full story of both European Cup wins here.
Clough and Lloyd: fines, fallouts and respect
The relationship between the two men was never comfortable, which is more or less how Clough wanted it. Forest folklore is full of Lloyd stories — most famously the club blazer he failed to pack for a European trip, which earned him a fine and a lecture in front of the squad.
Lloyd argued back more than most dared to, and Clough seemed to rate him more for it. He was a leader in a dressing room full of strong personalities, and in a defence asked to hold a high line and defend narrow leads in hostile European stadiums, that mattered as much as anything he did with the ball.
England recall and life after Forest
His form at Forest brought him back into the England reckoning, and he won a fourth cap in 1980 — roughly nine years after his third. It is one of the longer gaps between international appearances an English defender has managed, and a neat measure of what Clough and Taylor had rebuilt.
Lloyd left Forest in 1981 to become player-manager of Wigan Athletic, taking them up from the Fourth Division in 1982, and later managed Notts County. He stayed in Nottingham afterwards, ran a pub, and became a fixture on local radio phone-ins, where he was as blunt about Forest as he had been about everyone else. He died in March 2024, aged 75, and the tributes from the club and from supporters reflected how completely he belonged to the City Ground.
Where Larry Lloyd sits in Forest’s history
Forest have had more gifted footballers than Larry Lloyd. They have had very few more important ones. Two European Cups, a league title and two League Cups in five years is a return almost nobody in the English game can match, and he was a starter through the whole of it.
Any argument about Forest’s greatest ever XI tends to get stuck at centre-half, because there are only two shirts and an awful lot of candidates. Lloyd’s name is always among the first written down — and usually with Burns’ next to it, because that is how the Reds’ supporters have thought about him for nearly 50 years.
