Since this summer, Nottingham Forest have undergone a lot of changes.
It all seemed to start with the appointment of Sabri Lamouchi as their new manager, and the Frenchman has done wonders with the squad at his disposal so far, as the club sit fourth in the Championship with a game in hand.
Then came the announcements that François Modesto would become the club’s new technical director and José Anigo, who formerly managed Marseille, was appointed as their head of recruitment.
However, this whole plan was well underway before the summer, as Modesto revealed in an interview with So Foot.
He said: “For the past three years, I’ve been working with Olympiakos on recruiting, and since the president, Evangélos Marinákis also bought Nottingham Forest, I’ve been working on both clubs. Since January, I’ve been travelling between both, but I’m going to be [in Nottingham] more from now on.
“Everything is pretty much done at Olympiakos. We need to do the same here. They’re two very different clubs with different styles, but if we have a player here that isn’t at his best, we can send him to the other to kickstart things again, if that pleases both managers of course. We did it with Bouchalakis and Soudani already”.
With the knowledge that Modesto had been pulling the strings behind the scenes for nine months before the official announcement in October, the rest of the appointments make sense.
Asked if he had anything to do with Lamouchi’s and Anigo’s arrivals, he said: “Of course. I got in touch with Sabri. I’d never worked with him, but I saw what he did at Rennes, how his team played, and I liked it. I got to know José in Greece when he managed Levadiakos. Before that, we’d only crossed paths. It clicked in Greece, we saw each other here and there, had a coffee.
“He has a lot of experience. He was in the biggest club in France at Marseille for 20 years where there’s huge amounts of pressure. He did a very good recruiting job. He met the president, it went well. He helped bring Brice Samba, Samba Sow and other players, and because he had Sabri as a player back in the day, it makes things easier. We know each other well, work together and it saves time when kickstarting a project”.
