Brian Clough would have told Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis to "calm down" if 22 summer signings were planned under his management. That's according to former Liverpool midfielder turned pundit Graeme Souness, who said Clough would want the "football sphere" left in his control if he were in charge at Forest today.
Souness says the legendary manager would have refused to work under a director of football or head of scouting, too, and it would be "hard to imagine" him working at the City Ground under Marinakis. "It's 18 years this week since Clough died and football is a different world now to the one when our team and his team went head to head - no quarter spared," Souness wrote in his latest Daily Mail column.
"We have directors of football, heads of scouting and recruitment committees. There's not a chance that Clough would have accepted any of them. He was a manager in the full meaning of the word. He managed and he controlled virtually every aspect of that football club. And he did all the talking.
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"It's hard to imagine him operating at the modern Forest. No sooner had Steve Cooper completed the incredible job of taking the team from the foot of the Championship to the Premier League inside eight months, their excitable owner Evangelos Marinakis was declaring the club had to be 'ready for trophies.'
"I suspect Clough would have been telling Marinakis to calm down and leave the football sphere to him.
"I'm not sure how much say Cooper would have had in the decision to bring 22 players in this summer. If I had been Cooper and Marinakis had told me, 'I'm going to spend £150million on 22 players', I would have said, 'Spend that money on six or seven top players.'
"I know they had a lot of players on loan last season but 22? In one summer? I would very much doubt that that has ever happened before at major league in world football. It's too many and just not conducive to being a successful football club.
"Without the power that Clough wielded, it's difficult for Cooper to exert the control that we saw when Forest were promoted as the Second Division's third placed team in 1977. Back then, they immediately won the First Division title and then lifted the European Cup twice. For me, that's still the greatest achievement in British football.
"Cooper would just not have had the time to look at all those signings because of the relentless job of preparing Forest for two games a week - every week - in the Championship. I actually doubt he'd have put his name to more than a handful."
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