Nottingham Forest head coach Steve Coach is expecting the club to continue their prolific transfer business as they adapt to life in the Premier League.
The Reds have spent more than £80million on 12 players as they rebuild a promotion winning team ravaged by the departures of five loan players, as well as senior players in Brice Samba, Lewis Grabban and Tobias Figueiredo.
Forest have been linked with Atalanta midfielder Remo Freuler and Willem II striker Jizz Hornkamp, while they continue to pursue a big money move for Wolves forward Morgan Gibbs-White. Cooper did not comment on individual names but admitted work continues to add further quality to the squad ahead of Saturday's opening game of the season at Newcastle United.
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"A number I don’t know. It’s not a straightforward process in bringing a player in, I don’t know in terms of numbers," he said.
"I think there will be more ins and outs. My focus is on the players that are already here. I Imagine we’re getting linked with all sorts of names, maybe some truth in them and some there will be no truth at all. My focus is on the guys who are coming into training every day and preparing for the next game because they deserve 100 per cent attention."
Forest's media presence has increased exponentially since promotion, especially with the arrival of Jesse Lingard. Much has been made of how prolific the Reds have been this summer when it comes to signings with comparisons made with the 2018 Fulham side which flopped despite an investment of more than £100m.
Cooper distances himself from such comparisons, pointing out that Forest had to make changes and are effectively playing catch on up on Fulham and Bournemouth, the other promoted sides, who already had their teams in place.
"We’re not making them comparisons. We had no choice than to change the team as we are. We had five players on loan, players out of contract etc etc. Even if we were still in the Championship we would have made the same amount of changes," he said.
"It’s not about comparing to anyone else but if you look at some of the other teams who have come up recently or come up with us, we are making signings they already had in their squad, we’re catching up in some ways. We see everything as an opportunity to get better, we know we’re going into the toughest challenge there is in domestic football in the world, so we’re doing our best to be ready for it
"We knew it would be more of a change than normal in an ideal world, if I’m being honest, we would have liked to have carried on with large part of the team from last year and just added where we thought we needed to add to to compete at the level but that was never going to be the case. We had no alternative than to make the amount of changes that we’ve had to make and are continuing to do so.
"There’s still a good core of players who are still here which was a massive part of our success last year and we want to continue to build on that. In some ways it looks like a reshaping of the squad but we’re very much of the narrative that we’re continuing with what we’ve started but it just looks a bit different with the players that have come in. It’s an objective to recreate if not improve the togetherness we had last year."
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