Fehérvár striker Levente Szabó has revealed how a ‘change of ownership’ at Nottingham Forest in 2017 stopped him from joining English club.
The forward has been speaking to the Hungarian club’s official website about his career so far, and how he could have ended up at the City Ground earlier in his career.
That career started at ETO FC Győr Youth before he moved to Atalanta to join their youth set up and then Genoa in 2017.
His time in Italy did not prove to be a successful one and he returned to Hungary with Fehérvár, where he’s been ever since, going out on various loans before moving up to the first team at the end of last year.
He’s been slowly establishing himself since then, with four goals and three assists in 40 games so far and just over 1000 minutes of first-team action.
It seems things could have been very different, though, as he narrowly missed out on a transfer in a first transfer window, trained with Nottingham Forest for six months with a promise to be bought in the summer, but that never happened due to the change of ownership.
He was therefore then free to leave Nottingham Forest for Genoa.
“It’s an interesting story because I ended up in Genoa with a detour from England,” he said.
“In January, it happened that I was going to transfer to Nottingham Forest, I went there, but in the end, we ran out of the transfer period, so I only trained with the English team for half a year.
“The agreement was that they would sign in the summer, but that summer there was a change of ownership at the team, so in the end the contract did not work out. That’s when Genoa approached me and because I liked playing football in Italy, I signed for them.”
