Who To Pick From Nottm Forest

Drafting from Nottm Forest

Five Englishmen, five Brazilians. Look down the nationality counts at every other club on the wheel and England leads outright; at Forest it is a dead heat, and that tells you how this squad was put together. Not a local spine with imports bolted on, but two recruitment projects meeting in the middle. Murillo at 82 and Nikola Milenković at 83 are what the collision produced: a centre-half pairing one rating point apart that would walk into sides rated well above Forest's 81.

So draft them from the back. Twenty-six players, five of them elite, a spread of six, and a strength that is structural rather than star-led. Matz Sels at 82 is a proper goalkeeper even though the group as a whole sits at 76 across three, which makes the position a coin-flip between good and ordinary rather than an outright hazard. Attacking midfield at 81 across two is the best department here, with Morgan Gibbs-White at 84 the highest-rated man at the club, and Chris Wood at 82 gives you a centre-forward who needs no protecting. Chris Wood turns up again among the legends at 90, so that spin is an eight-point upgrade on a player you may already hold.

Take Stuart Pearce at 93 instead. No full-back appears anywhere in Forest's top five, and Pearce is a left back, which makes him the only one of the four legends who adds a defender this squad does not already have in some form. Stan Collymore at 92 and Des Walker at 90 both land on ground Wood and Milenković already cover. Every convincing Forest eleven is built out of the back four, and the back four is exactly where the current squad runs out of names.