Nottingham Forest dealt major Arsenal transfer blow as fresh claim made

A potential deal for Arsenal left-back Nuno Tavares to join Nottingham Forest is “currently off”, it has been claimed.

Forest had reportedly been working on a move for the 23-year-old, who has played 28 times for Arsenal since joining them from Benfica in 2021. He spent last season on loan with Marseille in Ligue 1.

He looked set to go out again on a temporary basis, with Forest keen as Steve Cooper continues to target a new left-back to replace last season’s loanee Renan Lodi.

As things stand, that will not be Tavares, according to the latest update from transfers expert Fabrizio Romano. The reporter tweeted to his 18.2 million followers on Saturday afternoon: “Nuno Tavares and Nottingham Forest, deal currently OFF — as he’s already considering different options.”

Less than an hour before that update, Romano had posted: “Understand talks between Nottingham Forest and Arsenal for Nuno Tavares are not easy — deal getting complicated at this stage. There are other options for Nuno now.”

The Reds had been linked with a £30 million move for Tavares, while other reports suggested a loan enquiry has been made. Arsenal’s preference is not clear but Tavares has plenty of other potential suitors across Europe.

Despite that, his future remains in doubt, with Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta recently admitting his squad is currently “unsustainable” as he looks to move fringe players on in the summer transfer window.

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Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis has admitted “we all make mistakes” after signing 30 players in the summer transfer window last year.

This summer has been a much quieter one, with three new arrivals so far in Ola Aina, Anthony Elanga and Matt Turner. While there will be more signings to come, Marinakis admits mistakes were made and that the Reds will benefit from having a year of Premier League experience under their belts.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Marinakis said: “Yes, [things are more balanced] because everybody involved has a year of experience and of course at the beginning we all make mistakes.

“Premier League experience is very important and this club is a huge club but they have been for a very long time, exactly how old my son [Miltiadis] is since 1999, that it wasn’t in the Premier League.

“This club with the popularity and supporters, previous achievements in the Champions League has to be as high as possible. For me it was challenging and a team that I remember when I first came to boarding school in England was doing very well and were outperforming with Liverpool and a club that was very popular and I liked.

 

“Some years later I bought the club and want it to be established in the Premier League, we have spent a lot on the training centre, our stadium and have planning permission for our stadium and real estate development in the region.

“Every year we are improving and the dream is to see Nottingham Forest in the top 10 of the Premier League.

“The aim this year is to perform better than last year. If you saw last year some of the results and at the end of the day our points and the difference to teams around us, two wins and the team would have been 12th or 13th.

“For the first year in Premier League we did well, could have done better and we hope this year when we also complete our roster of transfers, that we have a much better team than last year.

“Of course if the team start performing there is no limit because it is a big team and what you saw last year is that Nottingham Forest in a lot of the bigger games against opponents we did very well and with smaller opponents not as expected.

“We lost some matches we should never have lost and I am optimistic, we stand behind our coach and some players that this year that they would be improving.

“You saw this with our striker Taiwo Awoniyi when he scored against Arsenal. He got the ball from the goalkeeper, ran really well with Anthony Elanga and it was very very good.”