Evangelos Marinakis, the man who took Nottingham Forest back to the Premier League

There’s no doubt he has an aura.

Evangelos Marinakis fills the seat that was specially put in for him when he became the new owner of Nottingham Forest. It is not quite a throne, but it is bigger than all the others. It is polished before every home game. It is the only seat in the entire stadium that has its own special cover.

There was a time when he was an infrequent visitor to Nottingham and it was unusual for him to attend games.

When Marinakis had his first look at the City Ground in 2017, the people who accompanied him remember his face darkening when he realised how far it lagged behind the Karaiskakis stadium, home of Olympiacos, his Greek club.

This season, though, Forest are back in the Premier League and Marinakis divides his time between watching Olympiacos and flying to England, if he is not already at his London residence, to follow the team he has bankrolled with a flex of his financial muscle.

The fans are happy to see him. They wave from different parts of the stand. On television, at the first game of the season, one supporter shook his hand and followed it up by genuflecting — arms up, palms out — in his direction. Marinakis took Forest back to the Premier League and, after 23 years in the wilderness, that goes a long way to securing his popularity.

Evangelos Marinakis takes his seat at the City Ground. His son Miltos (centre right) is also shown, sitting next to PR man Chris Wheatley (Photo: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

He also has big ambitions for Forest. This summer, he introduced himself to England’s top division by signing 22 players in an unprecedented transfer spree. He intends to vote, it is said, with the Big Six at Premier League meetings. His son, Miltiadis, is the rising power at Forest, entrusted to help run their transfer business and call the shots, aged 23.

But Forest are bottom of the league and it has been a tumultuous period. Steve Cooper appeared to be heading for the sack until a sudden volte-face ended with a new contract being presented to the manager who led the club to promotion last season. Cooper’s job had been under serious threat after five successive defeats and a series of damaging leaks about his contract offer being withdrawn and the list of possible replacements who were being sounded out.

It was a remarkable U-turn that can be celebrated by the club’s supporters as a victory, in part, for fan power. Perhaps it also tells us a lot about the emotional and mercurial thinking at the top of Forest.

But there have also been other parts to this story — political positioning, finger-pointing, backstabbing — that have simultaneously caused all sorts of disruption behind the scenes.

Last Tuesday, the morning after Forest had lost 4-0 at Leicester City, a senior club official circulated the story among various newspapers that chief executive Dane Murphy was also being held accountable for the team’s difficult start to the season and in danger of losing his job.

Murphy won the Championship’s CEO of the Year award last year. Furthermore, no mention was made of any blame being attached to Miltiadis, even though the owner’s son had positioned himself at the front and centre of Forest’s transfer activity and, using the power of social media, had made sure everyone knew about it.

Miltiadis, known as Miltos, is the oldest of Marinakis’ four children and his only son. Many people believe the long-term plan is that one day he will take over the family empire. Forest are eager to build his reputation.

Miltiadis Marinakis Jnr at the City Ground in September (Photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)

Yet The Athletic has discovered that the rift with Murphy might not, in reality, have been about the players who were signed or anything to do with the team’s results.

Murphy had lodged a complaint against the club because, he claimed, Forest had reneged on a contractual agreement to improve his terms – including a bonus – as a reward for promotion. He is understood to have sought legal advice.

It is a remarkable story of allegation, counter-allegation and infighting and it had created a state of civil war inside the boardroom. And for a long time, it looked like a war that Murphy could never win. Other stories were leaked that Murphy’s recruitment team – widely credited for assembling their promotion squad – were likely to be torpedoed with him. Anybody who was close to Murphy was in danger of being caught in the collateral damage.

In a further twist, it also turned out that one of the people Murphy held responsible was Ioannis Vrentzos, the previous Forest chief executive, who has relocated to Athens and operates as an accountant and Marinakis’ right-hand man.

And then, another volte-face. The Athletic approached Forest last Thursday to ask about this dispute and, within 24 hours, it was announced that Murphy was staying, after all. Perhaps they were terrified about the backlash if Cooper left and Murphy followed him out of the door. In Cooper’s case, the club were acutely aware of his popularity, the mood on social media and that the fans’ group Forza Garibaldi planned a banner in support of the manager.

Marinakis, you quickly learn, operates to his own beliefs about how a football club should be run. It is rarely dull, is often controversial and, for the most part, successful.

The Athletic has spoken to people who have had direct dealings with the Greek oligarch, with the aim of putting together the most comprehensive profile on him that has ever been written. But it is not straightforward.

Few people are allowed into his inner circle and those who do know him tend to be wary of speaking on the record. Many of the people we approached have clammed up. Others agree to talk but only if they are not identified.

Marinakis has been accused in the past of fixing matches, bribing and intimidating referees and being the head of an organisation that carries out this type of activity. He has always strenuously denied any wrongdoing and nothing has ever been proven as, one by one, the allegations that have been levied against him have been dismissed.

He is being investigated for the financing of drugs smuggling, just one aspect of a long, tortuous investigation relating to the events of 2014, when the Greek authorities conducted Europe’s largest-ever drugs bust and, in the bloody fallout of this sprawling tale, at least 18 witnesses or other people with connections to the case were left dead across three continents. A documentary is being made for the BBC about the infamous case of Noor One and the prosecutors in Greece are expected to deliver an update on their investigation next year.

Marinakis, who is being investigated for the financing of heroin smuggling only, has always strenuously denied any criminal activity. There has never been any suggestion he has anything to do with later developments in the Noor One case.

He blames “political enemies” and rival club owners for creating a reputation that makes him a highly divisive figure in Greece. It is a reputation, he says, that is tarnished by lies and smears.

“The things I am accused of couldn’t be further from my mentality and the way I operate as a person,” Marinakis said in 2017. “They are not only untrue, they are unthinkable. I do not answer publicly, by choice. Maybe it is a mistake, since others speak all the time, but it is not in my philosophy to feed the small-minded, vicious cycle of unsubstantiated yellow rumours. I prefer justice to take its course, no matter how long this will take in Greece.”

Evangelos Marinakis was born on July 30, 1967, into a family that owned the leading foundry in Crete, making bells for the island’s churches. His father, Miltiadis, exported their products to Italy, France and Croatia, as well as running other businesses on the island. Today, the bells still ring out in Heraklion, the city of Miltiadis’ birth.

The real love for Miltiadis, however, was shipping. He studied engineering at the Merchant Navy College and when he moved to Piraeus, he opened a repairs workshop. Within 10 years, he had established the shipping company that ultimately became the legacy for his son.

When Miltiadis died in 1999, at the age of 68, he had eight ships. The unofficial number now is 98, meaning Marinakis presides over one of the largest tanker fleets on earth.

Miltiadis was an Olympiacos fanatic who ran their water polo team and helped form the alliance of 11 shipowners who bought the club in 1979. He was the “general captain”, effectively chief executive, and there were four successive league titles on his watch before a sequence of events that made him turn his back on watching matches.

In 1987, the banker and publisher George Koskotas took control of Olympiacos and shocked the football world by breaking the world transfer record to sign Lajos Detari from Eintracht Frankfurt for £6million.

Miltiadis was one of only two shareholders who refused to sell his stake to a man whose name became synonymous with one of the biggest financial and political scandals in the history of modern Greece. Koskotas, it emerged, had created his empire by embezzling $210million from the Bank of Crete. He fled to Brazil as a fugitive and was eventually tracked down after absconding to Bedford, Massachusetts, on a private jet from Bermuda.

It was a scandal that brought down the Greek government. Koskotas, once a painter and decorator in New York’s Long Island, was extradited and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

If this sounds more like a film plot than your standard football story, it is important to remember that scandals and politics have disfigured Greek football for decades. It is the nature of the system and stems from a long history, going all the way back to the Ottoman empire, of the political class forming relationships of corruption with rich and powerful families, businesses and interest groups.

Miltiadis also sought to overthrow the administration of Argyris Saliarelis, the next Olympiacos president, who ended up being imprisoned for helping Koskotas flee the country, and then it was left for billionaire Socrates Kokkalis — cleared in 2002 of accusations of espionage, fraud and money laundering — to get Olympiacos back on their feet.

It is a wild, eccentric story and not everyone was willing to champion Miltiadis, now on the outside of the club, as he moved into politics. He established himself as an MP for the New Democracy Party and a friend of prime minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis.

One newspaper, Epikairotita, published an article that targeted the eight people – “The Godfathers of Thrylos” – it blamed for a decade in which Olympiacos won a couple of cups but nothing else. There were photographs of all eight “godfathers” across the top of the page. Kostokas was first. Miltiadis was next.

“I have never been the godfather of Olympiacos, nor of anyone else,” Miltiadis responded. “I love Olympiacos and I have been deprived of many things. From the moment the sale (to Koskotas) happened, I have stopped watching matches.”

The young Evangelos had a close-up view of everything. He, too, had caught the Olympiacos bug. From the age of 14, he would accompany his father on business trips to ports and docks around Europe. He studied in London. Then, in his early 20s, he was given the opportunity to take a more prominent role in the family’s shipping business.

“We spent a lot of time together, we travelled, talked and I absorbed the essence of the job,” Marinakis said in a speech to the Maritime Club of Piraeus after his father’s death. “It was about much more than just preserving our family fortune and making more money. We had a deep friendship.

“My father had an immediate charisma with people. He cared for his fellow man. He was conscious of the community. He cared for Heraklion, for Piraeus. He helped me to look at life in a human nature and not just professionally… to keep my sensibilities and not to lose my humanity, no matter how high I rise.”

There is little doubt, therefore, that Marinakis’ 2010 purchase of Olympiacos, as well as following his father into politics, was fuelled, in part, by his family history.

Evangelos Marinakis at Olympiacos in September 2013 (Photo: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images)

Marinakis is a former city councillor for Piraeus, on the south west edge of Athens, and still carries out mayor-like duties. He has personally funded various projects, from the renovation of city squares to the development of playgrounds, football pitches and soup kitchens. He has decorated the streets with statues of Greek heroes.

His personal website is filled with stories about the charity work that has earned him the Grand Cross award in Greece.

At the height of the refugee crisis, it was Marinakis who put in place a welcoming committee for the migrants who had arrived in Piraeus from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Piraeus was the main entry point to Greece. The city was struggling to cope. Every day, officials from Olympiacos arrived at the port to hand over meals, clothing and toys for refugee children.

Earlier this year, it was an invitation from Marinakis that led to Shakhtar Donetsk playing a “Stop War” friendly against Olympiacos in their first match since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The match raised funds for refugees and promoted a message of peace.

“I spoke with the owner of Olympiacos and his son only two days before and we agreed to play the game,” said Darijo Srna, Shakhtar’s director of football. “He even proposed that we could stay here for two months, that he would pay for everything and give the pitch to us.”

This is the side to Marinakis that his supporters say deserves more coverage: the acts of generosity, the philanthropy, his devotion to the social fabric of Piraeus, Athens and Greece as a whole.

In 2018, when a series of wildfires killed 103 people and devastated the Attica coastline, Marinakis announced that he would be donating €1million to the emergency effort.

When flash floods hit Mandra, killing 25 people, it was Marinakis again who coordinated a relief package to help the clean-up operation.

One photograph shows him touring the devastated area with an entourage that included Sasa Stamati, a television personality who mixes in high circles in Greece and later became embroiled in a controversy that demonstrates how strongly Marinakis’ supporters will go to defend his name.

In December last year, a theatre show by the comedian Christoforos Zaralikos, a well-known supporter of AEK Athens, was interrupted by Stamati storming on stage to interrupt an act that included telling a joke at Marinakis’ expense.

For context, one of Marinakis’ enemies in Greek football is AEK’s owner, Dimitris Melissanidis, and this goes way beyond the realms of usual sporting rivalry.

Both men were outspoken about one another after the 2014 attack on Christoforos Zografos, the vice-president of Greece’s referee selection committee, who was left with serious head injuries after being savagely beaten outside his home by two men using iron bars.

So it did not go down well when Zaralikos name-checked Marinakis as part of his performance.

Stamati was accompanied on stage by a number of unidentified men she later described as friends rather than, as the comedian alleged, “bravos” (security men). But it still became a huge talking point in Greece.

The whole incident was caught on film and at one stage she can be heard saying to Zaralikos: “I didn’t hear you say anything about your friend Melissanidis.”

So what’s it like to work for Marinakis?

Challenging is the short answer — and the Marinakis regime probably want to keep it that way bearing in mind it has brought Olympiacos a period of near-unremitting success.

Visit the Karaiskakis and you will find a stadium with 40 executive lounges, a museum, shopping centre and a loud, fiercely devoted fanbase. “This is our land,” read the signs at the training ground. Olympiacos have won the league in 10 out of 12 years since Marinakis became president, often by landslide margins.

But this is not an orthodox arrangement and Marinakis does not get his success from conventional ways.

He trades an inordinate number of players, going back to his first summer at Olympiacos when he funded 19 new signings while the rest of Greece was heading towards a financial crisis. He sets the bar high. He prefers immediate success to long-term strategies. He backs himself. He does not give many interviews, but when he speaks publicly he can be controversial.

In June, he was the keynote speaker at the annual Shipowners’ Forum in Athens and was quoted by the industry website Splash247 as describing the sanctions against Russia as “bullshit” owing to the impact on ship owners.

Marinakis’ involvement with Olympiacos started with two brief spells in charge of its volleyball team and, even then, he knew the attractions of bringing in a star name. When he signed the Serbian volleyball legend Ivan Miljkovic – a deal known as “the transfer of the century” – it was Marinakis who paid almost half the player’s salary.

The people inside his inner circle are fiercely loyal to him. Nor is he the only one at Olympiacos who is shadowed by heavily built bodyguards clad in black. For the people at the highest levels of the club, and their families, it is normal everyday life.

Not that Marinakis scares easily. In Athens, they still talk about the time he abandoned usual protocol to attend a Panathinaikos-Olympiacos derby in 2015.

It is known as “the derby of the Eternal Enemies”. Away fans have been banned in Greece since 2004, but there was so much violence and disruption that night that the government’s immediate reaction was to suspend the Super League. And the announcement, pre-match, that Marinakis intended to go to the Apostolos Nikolaidis stadium for the first time was seen as sensational.

Marinakis watches Olympiacos take on Panathinaikos in February 2015 (Photo: GIORGOS MATTHEOS/AFP via Getty Images)

Michael Yokhin, covering the game for ESPN, wrote about the moment Marinakis entered the field 35 minutes before kick-off. “Instead of going to the bench, he decided to walk around. He did not seem to directly provoke the Greens (the colour of Panathinaikos) in the stands but the stadium went completely wild with rage. With fireworks and smoke everywhere, bottles were thrown in Marinakis’ direction. Very rarely have I witnessed such hatred towards one single person.”

Two days later, a Super League board meeting had to be abandoned when an argument between Marinakis and his Panathinaikos counterpart, Giannis Alafouzos, allegedly got out of hand.

Alafouzos complained afterwards that his deputy, Vasilis Konstantinou, a former Greek international goalkeeper, suffered a gashed lip from a blow from one of Marinakis’ heavies. “We were assaulted,” he said. “Mr Marinakis threw a glass of water at me and then his bodyguard threw a punch at Mr Konstantinou. I cannot believe that a Super League board meeting had such violence.”

There is also friction between Marinakis and Ivan Savvidis, the president of PAOK Salonika, who was banned from football for three years in 2018 after storming onto the pitch with a holstered gun in his belt and four bodyguards in tow because a late goal had been ruled out for offside in a crunch title match against AEK Athens. Savvidis is the Kremlin’s man, a former member of the Russian parliament with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.

For games at the Karaiskakis, Marinakis watches from Suite 311, flanked by security men. He likes to stand. His jacket inevitably comes off. The red tie, too. His shirt sleeves will be rolled up. On hot nights, that shirt might be drenched in sweat. He will cross his chest when the opposition has a corner or a dangerous free-kick. The tattoo on his left arm reads: “Dream, Love, Create, Fight, Survive, Win.”

Marinakis and co on the pitch at the Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium in February 2015 (Photo: Vladimir Rys Photography/Getty Images)

Olympiacos currently have a 38-man squad, which includes five goalkeepers, four right-backs, four left-backs, 19 new signings and has an average age of 27.6. In September alone, six new players arrived.

Marinakis has a large entourage of his own and that can be confusing sometimes for the staff at Forest when new people randomly pop up.

At one stage last season, Cooper came to realise there was somebody he did not recognise hanging around the training ground. This story is told in football circles and, even if it has been exaggerated over time, it always gets a laugh. Once, twice, three times this guy kept being seen. Cooper was starting to find it weird. He asked his staff if they knew who it was and nobody could enlighten him. Then the same guy turned up in the canteen and Cooper decided enough was enough and went over to ask who he was.

It turned out the mystery man was a member of the Monaco royal family. Louis Ducruet, the nephew of Prince Albert II, explained that he had been invited by Marinakis to take a role at Forest as an advisor on international projects.

Cooper is acutely aware Forest have some unorthodox ways and there are no doubt good reasons why he chose not to sign the contract that was offered to him at the start of June. Cooper would prefer to keep those reasons private. The most relevant part to him is that he has an emotional attachment with the club and the supporters in particular that he might never have elsewhere. Still, though, he understands he will be under intense pressure from Marinakis to bring about an improvement in results.

In 2018, Marinakis was so enraged about a run of three wins in eight games for Olympiacos that he fined the players €400,000 and threatened to expel some of the worst performers for the last four games of the season.

Olympiacos had fallen to third in the league and Marinakis announced that only a small number of players would be retained, with replacements to be called up from the under-20s. He was quoted in the Greek media telling the players: “I, and the rest of the fans, have tolerated you enough. You will leave today and go on holiday.”

He did not carry out that threat and Olympiacos lost two of the next four games. One was a 3-0 defeat at PAS Giannina and what followed, according to widespread reports, was a remarkable speech from Marinakis in front of the players at their Rentis training ground.

“Normally you should have stayed there (at Giannina) instead of coming back here because you cannot be Olympiacos players with those performances,” he told them. “Instead of wishing you to enjoy your holidays, we will say ‘go and drown’. This applies to all of you, players and coaches. You are not worthy of even being toilet paper in Rentis and, for that, the fault is no one else’s but mine. It’s my fault that I brought you here and I’m paying you in gold.”

Marinakis certainly has an aura about him (Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)

The following summer, more than 20 players were moved out and roughly the same number brought in.

Something similar happened in 2015 when Olympiacos lost to Panathinaikos, went out of the Europa League to Ukraine’s Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk and were held 1-1 in a Greek Cup tie with AEK Athens, then a second-division team. On that occasion, the players were reportedly fined €500,000. They were three points clear at the top of the league at the time.

Again, Marinakis’ message to the players was widely reported in the Greek media.

“I will tell you something very important and non-negotiable. Olympiacos is the biggest Greek club and for each of you it is an honour to play for this club,” Marinakis was quoted as saying. “You will respect and honour Olympiacos. Anyone who has a problem, or doesn’t like it here, should have the guts and get up and leave, and that applies to everyone.”

What is absolutely clear is that Marinakis finds it hard to tolerate anything but massive success and takes it as a personal affront when his teams do not meet his expectations. But it is easy to understand why many people at Forest think they will continue to struggle for stability as long as the people at the top of the club remain so emotional and volatile.

In September 2020, a Zoom call was arranged with the Forest players and they took their seats in a room at the training ground to find out what Marinakis wanted to say.

The new league season, starting late because of COVID-19, was a few days away and the expectation was that the club’s owner intended to give them a few words of support. But the players were in for a surprise. Forest had lost an EFL Cup tie at Barnsley a few days earlier and finished the previous season with a dramatic 4-1 collapse against Stoke City that cost them a place in the Championship play-offs.

Marinakis is said to have accused the players of letting the club down. Among his criticisms, he told them it was a humiliation to lose to a club with Barnsley’s budget. Changes were going to be made.

“His message was basically that some of us weren’t good enough and wouldn’t be there for very long,” says one former player, who has asked to remain anonymous. “To go that extreme at the start of the season was strange. Maybe it comes back to the cultural differences. Maybe that was what he was used to doing at Olympiacos after a defeat. Everyone here, though, was baffled by the timing of it. He didn’t shout, he was always calm, but his message was clear. It was the writing on the wall for a lot of players.”

This was three years into his ownership and the Marinakis era, pre-Cooper, was not a successful one. Vrentzos had been appointed as Forest’s chief executive. The new regime were embarrassed by Forest’s second-tier status (hence Marinakis largely staying away).

A succession of managers and players left Forest with very little positive to say about the club’s hierarchy. One player secretly taped his conversations with Vrentzos. Players’ families often commented that Forest, at boardroom level, did the least to look after them out of all of the clubs they had known.

Unofficially, there were rules in place. Staff knew that when Marinakis was visiting they had to keep their distance and give him his privacy. They were told not to wear green because it was the colour of Panathinaikos. Purple was also contentious because Marinakis was superstitious and apparently considered it bad luck.

When the takeover was completed in 2017, the colour-scheming involved Forest officials checking every room almost forensically to make sure everything was in order. Black was also ruled out for reasons not fully explained. Staff were asked to replace black picture frames with silver ones and make sure the televisions had silver edges. The design for one training kit had to be changed, it is said, because it contained too much green.

Marinakis arrived with a five-year plan to win promotion, qualify for Europe, move to a new state-of-the-art training ground and have Champions League-level facilities.

Marinakis, it was explained, wanted to run Forest with the values of traditional, old-school Arsenal. The first impressions were overwhelmingly positive.

He had deeper pockets than the previous owner, Fawaz al Hasawi, and offered a change in direction for a club that had become synonymous with transfer embargoes, winding-up orders, fan protests and plummeting crowds.

Marinakis announced his arrival by slashing ticket prices, which was always going to be popular, and he appointed a London-based QC, Nicholas Randall, to give the club some extra front-of-house respectability. Randall was installed as chairman and staff were told they always had to include the “QC” after his name.

“If I had any doubts at all about the suitability of Mr Marinakis to be the owner of your club, I would not have accepted the offer to be chairman,” Randall wrote in an open letter published on Forest’s website. “It is clear that Mr Marinakis has never been convicted of any crime in any jurisdiction in the world. That is a fact.”

The most common allegations against Marinakis at that point related to the 2015 match-fixing scandal in Greece, in which 68 suspects were named by the judicial authorities, and the story of a bomb blowing up the bakery of a referee who, it was said, was uncooperative. Marinakis, who vehemently denied any involvement, was acquitted without it ever going to a trial.

The allegations, Randall stated emphatically, had been proven to be false. “Many, if not all of those allegations, have been made against him by his competitors in football… there is cogent evidence that there has been nefarious intent behind many of those allegations.”

Staff at Forest quickly found that, to Marinakis, reputation was hugely important. The media team were expected to shape opinion in his favour. Staff were told to assemble any articles mentioning the owner and grade them as green, orange or red, depending on whether they were positive or not. Social media was also heavily monitored.

Look on Twitter now and it quickly becomes clear that many Forest fans like his badass reputation. They relish the fact he has spent mind-boggling money on a club that desperately needed some ambition, especially now there is planning permission to extend the stadium.

Marinakis has been feted. In the warm afterglow of promotion, his stock was never higher. Randall refers to him almost deferentially as “Mr Marinakis”. He is, the chairman says, a “model owner”.

‘Mr Marinakis’ in Athens in September 2016 (Photo: Wassilios Aswestopoulos/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It was not always so kind, however, before Cooper set about turning a club that was bottom of the Championship into one that won promotion via the play-offs. Some of the more critical fans were blocked by the official Forest account. Others were tracked down and invited to attend meetings at the City Ground, where they were warned about their conduct.

In Greece, Marinakis owns a considerable chunk of the media, including a television station, newspapers, magazines and websites. It gives him a certain amount of control over the messages that go out in a country where media ownership is often about power as well as profit.

He did not have that luxury in England, however. In his first few years as Forest’s owner, one of his PR aides floated the idea to The Guardian newspaper and, separately, The Nottingham Post that Marinakis might be interested in adding them to his portfolio. Neither idea got very far.

What was largely unknown was that, behind the scenes, Marinakis had put his stamp on Forest long before it all became official.

It was Marinakis, for example, who held talks with Pedro Pereira, the sporting director of Fiorentina, that led to him being appointed as Forest’s director of football in the summer of 2016.

Marinakis explained the plans to make Forest great again. The club wanted an experienced administrator. Pereira listened, took it in and agreed to leave Italy to make a new home in Nottingham.

Victor Sanchez, the former Spain international, was initially meant to get the manager’s job but learned, to his cost, how quickly the Forest hierarchy can change their minds.

Marco Silva, then the Olympiacos manager, had quit in pre-season and that meant there was another managerial appointment to fill and some awkward conversations to have. Sanchez knew the Erythrolefki (the Red-Whites) – he was assistant manager to Michel when they won the league in 2013 and 2014 – so Plan A was abandoned and the Spaniard got the Olympiacos job rather than the Forest one.

Philippe Montanier, the former Rennes manager, took over at Forest. It gets even more complicated when you consider what happened when the English Football League set about examining whether Marinakis should pass the fit-and-proper person’s test, which is mandatory for any takeover to go through.

The delays were considerable. Al Hasawi started speaking to Red Bull and other potential buyers from China and the United States. Pereira was stuck with a faltering club, an owner who was rapidly losing interest, and the inescapable feeling that he had made the worst decision of his professional life. He resigned within three months.

It was an unorthodox start to Marinakis’ relationship with Forest and it was difficult not to sympathise with Sanchez, too.

At Olympiacos, he was sacked after two games in charge.

“The president had asked me, as a favour, to go to Olympiacos instead of Forest,” Sanchez tells The Athletic. “I was asked to help solve a difficult situation. That was a big mistake from my side. I love English football and I lost that chance. I went to Olympiacos as head coach and they sacked me after 48 days with a lack of respect for my work.”

Sanchez insists he retains some happy memories of Olympiacos and points out he gave debuts to Panagiotis Retsos and Kostas Tsimikas, two academy players who commanded big fees when they were sold to Bayer Leverkusen and Liverpool respectively.

Plainly, though, it is not easy being a manager when Marinakis is The Boss. Plenty have tried and few have kept him happy.

“I am always thankful for the opportunities that life brings you,” says Sanchez. “Some are good, others not so good, but all of them are life lessons.”

Every Christmas, Marinakis holds a party at the Buddha Bar in Knightsbridge. There is a VIP guest list. It is a free bar. He does not always attend, but he likes the night to have a Marinakis theme. One of the vodka ice luges is sculpted as the Forest tree. Another is shaped in the Olympiacos crest.

Marinakis has held other parties on his yacht, Amore Mio, but largely prefers not to vaunt his wealth. He prefers to drive himself rather than using a chauffeur, and though he has an extensive art collection, he tends to keep it private.

The staff at Forest would hear these stories in the getting-to-know-you stages with Marinakis.

They quickly found out the new owner intended to take advantage of the fact he had two clubs and could move players from one to the other without breaking any rules. To begin with, it was largely Forest taking fringe players from Olympiacos. Nowadays, the pattern has reversed.

Olympiacos’ success has dwarfed that of Forest (Photo: Vladimir Rys Photography/Getty Images)

Marinakis kept his distance while Forest were in the Championship, particularly during the first few years. He was happy to leave Vrentzos with the day-to-day running of the club and that, on reflection, was probably his biggest mistake during the period, from 2017 to 2021, that Forest captain Joe Worrall described on the Wembley pitch, directly after winning promotion, as “shite”.

Vrentzos, previously the finance director at Olympiacos, was seen by many as Marinakis’ attack dog.

If games were not going well, he might appear in the tunnel to eyeball the players or even sometimes challenge them openly. After bad results, he had a habit of turning up to watch their next training session and watching alone, arms folded, glaring, from the side of the pitch.

Former colleagues used to say he did not like to see members of staff smiling because, at Olympiacos, it could be seen as complacency.

At the heart of all this, there is an acceptance from both the Greek and the English sides that what might work for one club is not necessarily the correct way to run the other. It just took a long time — too long, undoubtedly — for the relevant people to realise it.

Aitor Karanka was so worn down by his experiences with Vrentzos that he walked out while the team were on the edges of the play-offs. All sorts of people lost their jobs. Others quit because they disliked the working environment so much.

One room was christened the Departure Lounge because the running joke was that, if Vrentzos called you in, you would not be seen again. In one game, the BBC commentator had to explain to listeners that the person they could hear in the background was Vrentzos, shouting at the pitch from the directors’ box.

If Forest were going to create a successful environment, something had to change. And, to his credit, Marinakis did eventually recognise that, too.

Vrentzos remained a Forest director but returned to Olympiacos, and Murphy, previously Barnsley’s chief executive, set about introducing a new way of thinking that led to Cooper’s appointment (others at the club wanted Chris Wilder) and, ultimately, promotion. Forest suddenly had take-off.

Against that kind of backdrop, it was easy to understand why many Forest fans were startled to learn last week that two of the main architects for last season’s success might be moved out of the club.

This kind of ruthlessness, however, has been part of the Marinakis story ever since he took control of Olympiacos in June 2010, at the same time that a German manager, Ewald Lienen, was being put in charge of the team.

Lienen won his first three games 5-0, 6-1 and 2-1, but the fourth was a 1-0 defeat to Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel. It put Olympiacos out of the Europa League qualifiers and Marinakis brought back the popular Ernesto Valverde for his second spell as manager. Lienen had lasted 53 days.

“They are strange,” says Lienen. “I built him (Marinakis) a team in four weeks. I couldn’t use them all (the players) because they were not fit. Then he sent me away.”

In total, Marinakis has employed 20 different managers – 14 with Olympiacos, six with Forest – and nine have lasted six months or fewer. Pedro Martins stayed four years at Olympiacos, making him the longest-serving manager in the club’s 97-year history, but he was sacked in August. His replacement, Carlos Corberan, lasted 48 days. Michel is now back at the club as their third manager in two months. With Forest, there is a considerable turnover of staff, in many departments.

It is probably better to keep an open mind, therefore, about what happens next with Murphy (many people inside the club suspect it might be only a short-term arrangement) and where it leaves Lee Charnley, who was appointed by Forest on a consultancy basis earlier this season.

Charnley, one of Mike Ashley’s closest allies at Newcastle United, was widely expected to replace Murphy despite any potential awkwardness it might have caused for the club’s chairman. Randall was part of Kevin Keegan’s legal team in 2009 when the former Newcastle manager sued the north east club for constructive dismissal, winning £2million in compensation.

David Squires, cartoonist for The Guardian, summed it up a short while back with a sketch that showed Jesse Lingard at the front of a queue of Forest signings. Cooper was beside him. “We just met,” reads the speech bubble. “Turns out we all work at the same place.”

A caricature Marinakis – black suit, pirate’s beard, thumbs up – can be seen in the background.

“Not for long,” reads his speech bubble.

Judging by the events of the past few weeks, it might have been very prescient. The vast majority of Forest fans were always hopeful, however, that Marinakis would spare Cooper. Many had made that clear to Miltos on the Twitter page where, until recently, the owner’s son liked to post videos from the directors’ box. The last one was August 14, the date of Forest’s last win.

In happier times, Miltos gives the impression that he loves the exposure. He is young, handsome, powerfully built, with the shoulders and torso of an Olympic swimmer. He likes to look good. He posts photographs of himself on Instagram on yachts and holidays. It is a privileged life, not long out of university, with all the rich man’s accessories.

Miltos Marinakis poses at Wembley after Forest sealed promotion to the Premier League (Photo: Getty Images)

He also had his own PR man, Chris Wheatley, who was subsequently invited to double up as Forest’s head of media even though his relationship with Cooper has often been strained. Cooper was hugely unimpressed that, presumably in the search for positive headlines, stories had been leaked about him at the start of June that he was close to signing a new contract. Cooper is a principled man who likes everything to be done the right way. He felt badly let down and Wheatley was summoned to explain himself.

Yet Wheatley, formerly the Arsenal correspondent for a London football website, was a friend of the younger Marinakis and that automatically put him in a position of strength.

He also understood the currency of PR in this era of rolling 24/7 news when football fans, more than ever, crave transfer stories and will celebrate the people who help them feed that addiction.

Forest spent more money in the summer than the rest of their 157-year history. They have outspent Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. It has been an unprecedented period of spending and, throughout the summer, the Miltos-Wheatley partnership put that to good effect to help the new kid on the block build his position.

When the French defender Giulian Biancone was about to sign from Troyes, a teaser was posted on Miltos’ Twitter account: “Bonjour, êtes-vous prêt pour Nottingham?”.

Hello, are you ready for Nottingham?

When Forest were preparing to announce the arrival of Wales international Neco Williams from Liverpool, the message was: “Mae’n edrych fel bod rhywun yn dod.”

It looks like someone is coming.

Lingard’s signing offered another opportunity for Miltos to position himself as the bearer of good news.

It was Miltos who pushed the deal from the start and invited Lingard to a Zoom meeting in which the owner’s son set out the club’s ambitions. His father, he explained, had big plans and the club wanted Lingard to be their poster boy.

Lingard was impressed from the start and did not mind that the man delivering this sales pitch was six years younger than him. Miltos came across as ambitious, driven and absolutely determined to get his man. They bonded.

Welcome @JesseLingard 🙏🏻💪🏼 @NFFC #NFFC #BELIEVE
— Miltiadis Marinakis (@mil7iadis) July 21, 2022

Miltos followed up the Zoom meeting by arranging for Lingard’s advisers to be flown to Athens, where they were treated like kings. Marinakis lives with his wife, Athanasia, amid high security at a mansion on the coast of Vouliagmeni. The visiting delegation were invited to Chez Marinakis and, when it came to hardening up the negotiations, Miltos was involved at every stage. It was never that he left the serious stuff to his father.

Finally, there were three days in London when Miltos bonded even more with Team Lingard and the deal was hammered out for the former Manchester United player. It was a big moment for Forest, gazumping West Ham and fighting off late interest from Newcastle United and Fulham. It was a personal triumph for Miltos and he wanted to break the news on his Twitter account. Forest let him go first – even before their official social media channels.

Opinions at Forest can be mixed. Some staff used to think it was poor etiquette that Miltos would expect treatment and massages. Others found him hard to engage. Miltos, it was said, would sometimes walk past without even a glance. Staff used to joke about giving him an over-exuberant hello to force him into saying one back. Some think it is a bit rich that he has been given so much credit for the club’s promotion.

Ultimately, though, this is the owner’s son and that always means special privileges. Miltos switched to Nottingham Trent University once his father’s takeover went through. One of the club’s sports scientists used to stay late if Miltos wanted a workout. The chef would prepare meals in Tupperware boxes so the junior Marinakis could take them home.

All the time, Miltos was getting used to the inner workings of a football club, building his contacts, learning about the industry.

One Twitter user dared to suggest that Olympiacos were not a good example of how to run a club. “We’ve owned the club for 12 years and won the league 10 times while also being the most successful Greek team in European competitions,” Miltos fired back. “But it’s ‘not a good example of running a club’. You make me laugh.”

He likes to be involved, to close the deals, to learn about powerful agents such as Jorge Mendes, a significant figure behind the scenes at Forest.

Miltos also has the connections and qualifications – including a master’s degree in political science and government – that make it tempting to think he might eventually follow his father, and his grandfather, into Greek politics.

His godmother is Dora Bakoyannis, sister of the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Dora is a former mayor of Athens and the mother of its current mayor. She, too, has suffered from the political climate in Greece. Marinakis was best man when Dora remarried in 1998, nine years after a terrorist group had assassinated her first husband.

For now, Miltos is learning on the job at Forest. Perhaps it is just inevitable that he will make a few mistakes and that, for someone so new to the role, there have been times when he has got in the way of more experienced professionals.

Forest’s recruitment team spent months researching possible signings. George Syrianos, the head of recruitment, and Andy Scott, the head of scouting, wanted to target young, talented players whose transfer fees would go up in value. Their strategy, fully endorsed by Murphy, was that Forest should continue going after players who were mostly aged 26 or below and place a heavy emphasis on data and analytics. Morgan Gibbs-White, for example, was always the top target.

Miltos, it is said, does not have such a forensic approach to his own recruitment plan. To the alarm of others, he was happy to revert to Forest’s previous system of targeting older players on huge salaries. He was desperate, for example, on the night of transfer deadline day to sign Michy Batshuayi because he thought recruiting from Chelsea, albeit an unwanted player, would be another Lingard-like statement. The deal never happened.

Cooper was not hugely enthralled by some of the other end-of-summer targets and a number of people had reservations about a multi-handed approach to recruitment in which Miltos was the de facto sporting director. On the one hand, everyone at the club is grateful for Marinakis’ financial backing. On the other hand, it can be a confusing and stressful environment, with so many different people holding different opinions and, at times, not enough joined-up thinking.

In late January, Cooper came off a 3-0 win against Barnsley to discover that Brentford had bid £18million for Brennan Johnson, Forest’s star player.

Cooper did not want to sell and made it absolutely clear he thought it would wreck Forest’s promotion hopes. It was a tense night because, before the game kicked off, Brentford had been led to believe their offer was going to be accepted. Marinakis had the final say and, ultimately, Cooper got his way.

Cooper got his way on Johnson and helped Forest to win promotion (Photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)

Johnson remained in Nottingham, as he always wanted, and four months later Miltos was on the balcony of Nottingham Council House, looking down on a sea of red as thousands of Forest fans gathered to celebrate promotion.

“Be sure that whatever he (Marinakis) aspires to do in life, he achieves,” he wrote on Instagram. “Which is a value that I will continue to take through my life.”

One day last October, a security guard at a block of apartments in Dubai let himself into one of the properties. Inside was the body of a man. Beside the corpse was the man’s dog. According to reports in Greece, the dog was also dead.

The dead man’s name was Vassilis Georgiadis and it was reported he had been in regular contact with the Greek embassy because he had vital evidence about the case of Noor One. He was a potential informant.

Noor One was the name of the oil tanker that passed through the Suez Canal and, on the morning of June 6, 2014, docked in Elefsina, 20 miles west of Athens, carrying at least two metric tons of heroin.

The heroin was transported to various locations, including a warehouse near Athens airport, where it was cut with marble dust from a quarry on nearby Mount Pentelikon. A team of six Kurds and Greeks worked overnight to dilute the heroin. What they didn’t know was that the police had been tipped by somebody on the fringes of the group. Thirty armed agents were surrounding the building.

“We got some sense of what we were dealing with when the dogs went berserk,” Georgios Katsoulis, the head of the Piraeus coast guard, later said. “Normally they sniff the heroin and move right toward it. But in this case, there was so much heroin, the dogs didn’t know where to go. They just started convulsing and barking violently.”

What followed has become a national obsession in Greece and, as the investigation into the drugs shipment got underway, Marinakis was one of the many who have been linked to the case. He is being investigated for the financing of the drugs smuggling element only, and there has never been any suggestion he has anything to do with the later developments in the case. He has always strongly denied any criminality.

Marinakis is said to be taking legal action over an article, called The Vampire Ship, that was published about the Noor One as the lead article in the October 2020 edition of The New Republic and earned its author, Alexander Clapp, the runner-up prize in the Pulitzer Center’s annual Breakthrough Journalism Award. Marinakis appears to have chosen not to sue the magazine itself, rather the Athens-based journalist who spent a year investigating the case.

In 2018, Randall wrote another open letter on Forest’s website to say he fully accepted Marinakis’ claims of innocence and that he, as a QC, did not believe there was any legitimate evidence.

“It is often the case that when issues of character are at stake, there are simple facts which are overlooked but which can be the most telling,” Randall wrote. “I believe this to be the case here. Mr Marinakis has chosen to manage his businesses from London and New York. These are the most rigorous regulatory regimes in the world. These are not, I would suggest, the actions of a man with something to hide.”

In Greece, it has been widely reported that the investigation is still underway and the public prosecutor has told The Athletic that is the case.

In Nottingham, meanwhile, Forest are preparing to play Aston Villa and the reason why the players in red will be wearing shirts without a sponsor is because nobody has been willing to pay the amount Marinakis has set. A new sporting director has just been appointed – Filippo Giraldi, formerly of Watford – and time will tell whether that lessens Miltos’ involvement on transfers.

It has been a tense time for everybody connected with the club and perhaps the most relevant question is this: does spending a huge amount of money automatically qualify somebody as a “model owner”?

It helps, of course. Which football fan does not want a rich, generous owner? And Forest, lest it be forgotten, know what it’s like to be financially hard-up, pre-Marinakis, and paying wages late. Nobody at Forest wants to go back to that. Marinakis will be clapped to his seat the next time he is at a game.

At the same time, the constant message that keeps coming back to The Athletic is that, while there are some brilliant and dedicated people in the offices and at the training ground, there are other elements behind the scenes that are wrong and, unless fixed, will continue to undermine the club.

Cooper is highly aware of these issues. So are many others behind the scenes, where it is joked that at least Amazon or Netflix have not realised the potential for a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Not yet, anyway.

Until last week, Forest had a deal in place to appoint a PR executive from another Premier League club as their new director of communications. Astonishingly, it would have been the fifth different person in charge of Forest’s communications strategy since promotion on May 29. One was removed just a few days after Wembley. Another lasted seven weeks, another brought in as an interim. And on and on. After seeing what has happened in the past week, the PR executive has decided to stay where he is.

At the weekend, The Athletic was told Wheatley’s future at Forest was now in serious doubt. The club, and Marinakis, have not responded to our request for a comment on issues raised in this article.

It is a long, complex story, but at least Marinakis has maintained a level of good behaviour in England that has not always been so evident in Greece, where he was once banned from entering the field of play for five months, later reduced to two months on appeal, after allegedly verbally abusing a referee (a case that is still rumbling). In one infamous game against Panathinaikos, he went on the pitch after the final whistle, becoming embroiled in a row with opposition striker Djibril Cisse while fans allegedly attacked some of the visiting players.

Not that Marinakis’ past transgressions appear to have diminished his status too much in the country where he wields so much power over society, economy and politics.

In May, the bigwigs of Greek football gathered to elect a new president for the Super League and one of the mandates was to appoint someone who would help clean up the league’s reputation. Two candidates were put forward and the underdog — Panourgias Papaioannou, the president of PAS Lamia 1964 — eventually withdrew.

Nine clubs voted in support of the winner. Five returned no-votes, as did the Hellenic Football Association. Nonetheless, it was a clear victory.

The winner? Evangelos Marinakis.

Additional contributor: Paul Taylor

(Design: Sam Richardson)