The Nottingham Forest academy has a production line that supporters can recite from memory, but a new book turns the camera the other way — onto the boys who do not make it. In “Prez”, Andrew Prestwich tells the story of his son Charlie’s six years at the Nigel Doughty Academy, and it is one of the most revealing accounts of life inside the Reds’ youth system yet published.
Six years at Wilford Lane
Charlie “Prez” Prestwich first arrived for trials at the age of 10 in 2017. He progressed through the age groups at Forest’s facility just off Wilford Lane and reached under-16 level before his time at the club came to an end. He has since left football altogether.
That outcome is the norm rather than the exception, and it is precisely why the book matters. The journeys that end in a first-team debut are documented endlessly; the ones that end quietly, in a meeting room or a phone call, almost never are. Forest’s current squad shows how narrow the funnel is — captain Ryan Yates came through the ranks, as did Zach Abbott, who signed a new deal to 2030 before joining Southampton on a season-long loan. For every one of those, dozens of Charlies pass through.
Education as the battleground
The most pointed thread in the book is not tactics or coaching but schooling. Prestwich returns repeatedly to how seriously clubs treat a young player’s education, and it was, by his account, a sticking point towards the end of Charlie’s spell at Forest.
His argument is that the two do not have to compete. “It can be made to work,” he told the Nottingham Post, adding that he believes clubs “should do more to sell that” to families weighing up whether to commit a child to an academy pathway.
It is a fair challenge. Academy football asks enormous things of children — travel, training loads, assessment, rejection — and the compensation on offer is a probability, not a promise. Any club that can credibly tell a 12-year-old’s parents that the classroom will not be sacrificed has a genuine recruitment advantage.
Not a hatchet job
Anyone expecting a demolition of the club will not find one. The book is warm, funny and full of grassroots characters, with a peek behind the academy curtain running alongside anecdotes that stretch as far back as Brian Clough and Robert Maxwell. The eye-opening material comes in the later stages, when the reality of how hard it is to make the grade closes in.
Charlie emerges as the star of it — a boy his father describes as having shown mental steel “right from birth”. Prestwich is honest that not every youngster is built that way, and that the emotional weight of academy football can be a great deal for a teenager to carry.
Why the Nottingham Forest academy story matters
The Nigel Doughty Academy is woven into the identity of this club, and its graduates are a source of real pride at the City Ground. Our guide to how the Nottingham Forest academy works sets out the structure and the names it has produced. What “Prez” adds is the other side of the ledger: the years of commitment from families who get no medal at the end of it, and the questions clubs across the Premier League are still being asked about duty of care.
Forest return to action against Coventry City at the City Ground on Saturday 19 September, the last fixture before the international break. Between now and then, this is a Forest story worth an hour of any supporter’s time.
