Elliot Anderson: Nottingham Forest's £100m Talent

At Nottingham Forest these days, the talent is obvious. The price of prising it away is even clearer.

Elliot Anderson has become the latest name to flicker across recruitment screens at the Etihad Stadium and Old Trafford, but anyone thinking Forest will be bullied into a sale has not been paying attention. Evangelos Marinakis does not do cut‑price. He does leverage, brinkmanship and, when it suits him, a flat refusal.

If Anderson goes, he goes on Forest’s terms.

A £100m problem for Manchester

The numbers being whispered around boardrooms are brutal: a nine‑figure fee. City and United are being told to find £100 million and more if they want a midfielder expected to light up this summer’s World Cup under Thomas Tuchel with England.

For Forest, that kind of cheque would transform the collective coffers on Trentside. It would mean the chance to sell one rising international and fund an entire phase of squad building. For the buying club, it is the cost of entry into a market where elite, all‑court midfielders are scarce and fiercely protected.

Anderson is exactly that profile. Jack Colback, who shared a dressing room with him at the City Ground, does not bother with nuance when asked what the 21-year-old already is and what he might become.

“He’s just very, very good,” Colback told GOAL, speaking in association with Bally Bet. No caveats. No soft landing.

Colback sees something old-school in a player being built for the modern game. Not a neatly labelled No.6, or No.8, or No.10. All of them at once.

Anderson tackles. He screens. He dictates. He slides passes between the lines and then arrives on the end of moves he helped start. He creates. He surges forward. He does, as Colback puts it, “it all”.

Players like that do not stay cheap for long. They rarely stay put for long either.

If he delivers in North America this summer, his stock will rocket again. A World Cup platform, Tuchel’s trust, an England shirt and a game built for big stages – it is exactly the cocktail that turns a £100m valuation from outrageous to inevitable.

Murillo, Gibbs-White and a new Forest core

Anderson is not carrying Forest alone. Marinakis’ recruitment operation has quietly stacked the squad with players whose ceilings remain stubbornly out of sight.

Morgan Gibbs-White has already grown into the talismanic No.10 many suspected he could be, the kind of playmaker who wears the Garibaldi red as if it were made for him. Around him, the club has built a spine that looks as if it could anchor the next era, not just survive this one.

At the back, Murillo has become the symbol of that shift. The Brazilian centre-half, broad-shouldered and bold on the ball, did not slip in under the radar for long. Colback remembers the first impressions clearly.

Live, in the stadium, Murillo can look like the sort of defender who might leave a door ajar. A heavy touch here, an ambitious pass there. But then you watch the way he reads the game, how quickly he reacts, how often he gets there first. The risk becomes part of the package, not a flaw in it.

Forest have felt his absence this season when injuries bit. Their form dipped with him out of the side, a stark reminder of how central he already is. That, Colback argues, is as much a compliment to the club as it is to the player.

Recruitment, he says, has been “really, really good for a good few years now” – and he points the credit squarely at the owner. Murillo’s new contract, running to 2030, underlines that point. It is a statement as much as a signature.

Keep him that long and he, like Gibbs-White, does not just become a fan favourite. He becomes a modern Forest reference point, a player future generations are measured against.

Legends in the stands, legends in the making

The sense of continuity has been tangible around the City Ground lately. Some of those who dragged Forest back into the Premier League in 2022 have been back in familiar corridors, Colback among them.

They returned not for a lap of honour, but for something that says a lot about what the club still understands: the importance of the game below the glare.

Nottingham Forest’s front-of-shirt partner, Bally Bet, has been trying to give long-serving grassroots players the spotlight they rarely receive. To do it properly, they turned to a man who knows the club and its people as well as anyone – Mark Crossley.

The former Forest goalkeeper was handed a task that sounds simple and is anything but: assemble the first ever All-Stars Vets squad, built from the real characters of grassroots football. The lifers. The ones who play on pitches that cut up by November and never complain.

Crossley didn’t work alone. Other recognisable Forest faces joined him as he pieced together the Bally Bet All-Stars, a team drawn from stories and scars rather than scouting databases.

Then came the twist. For one night, the recreation grounds were swapped for the City Ground. The All-Stars walked out for the full Premier League treatment – the stadium, the noise, the sense of occasion – and faced a side of hand-picked Forest legends on May 28.

On the pitch, old heroes rolled back the years. In the stands, supporters watched a club that can still link its past to its present without forcing the connection.

And somewhere in between, under the same roof, sat the next generation of names that might one day be spoken of in the same breath – if, of course, Marinakis ever lets them leave.