Nottingham Forest’s tremendous rise up the Premier League ranks under manager Nuno Espirito Santo was bound to give them a chance to recoup some of their post-promotion transfer outlay whether they want to sell players or not.
Tottenham Hotspur are reportedly preparing to make a bold attempt to relieve Forest of one of their most important players, with Thomas Frank known to be an admirer of the England international and keen to bring him to Nuno’s former club.
Spurs can offer Champions League football after defeating Manchester United in May’s Europa League final in Bilbao, presenting the Forest star with a tempting prospect should the clubs come to an agreement.
Spurs are targeting Morgan Gibbs-White
David Ornstein and Daniel Taylor report that the North London club are setting their sights on the 25-year-old, who made his England debut last year and was integral in Forest’s style and success as they threatened the Champions League spots themselves in 2024-25.
“The prospect of losing Gibbs-White will be hard to take given his emergence as a high-calibre Premier League player,” Taylor writes for The Athletic.
Forest are set to sell Anthony Elanga to Newcastle United and the departure of Gibbs-White would represent another bitter, but lucrative, blow.
Gibbs-White joined Forest from Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2022, a move that was itself considered an expensive show of strength on the part of the buyers.
The former Swansea City and Sheffield United loanee has become one of the Premier League’s finest attacking midfielders, possessed of the kind of vision few of his peers can match and seemingly boundless creativity.
Most worryingly for Forest supporters, his slickness on the break and ability to do damage in the final third made him a vital component of Nuno’s often devastating system in 2024-25.
Under Frank, Spurs are moving to capitalise on their Champions League qualification to remedy a dismal season in the Premier League and get back to the upper reaches of the table next season.
Spurs finished in 17th place in Ange Postecoglou’s second season at the Tottenham Hotspur season, four points behind Wolves and above only the comfortably relegated trio of Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Southampton.
They won a European trophy and qualified for the Champions League but Frank will be tasked first and foremost with improving their league placing by 11 places at the very least.
Adding Gibbs-White to the expected arrival of Mohammed Kudus from West Ham United would give Spurs’ attacking play a fresh new look and a much more incisive threat.
However, it would leave Forest with a very difficult problem to solve. Their reported asking price of £65 million would go some way to cracking it.
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