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Nottingham Forest completed the appointment of Vítor Pereira as head coach on Sunday, handing the 57-year-old Portuguese a survival mission at the club now holds the unwanted distinction of being the first in Premier League history to deploy four permanent managers in a single season.
No other club in the history of the Premier League has used four different permanent managers in one season. This follows the procession of Nuno Espírito Santo, Ange Postecoglou, and Sean Dyche through the City Ground doors since August. Pereira signed an 18-month contract running until the summer of 2027, making him the club’s longest contracted manager of the current campaign. Nuno signed a three-year extension in June but was sacked in September after his relationship with Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis broke down irreparably. Postecoglou, who had just been dismissed by Tottenham, was installed as his replacement but lasted only 40 days, departing within minutes of a 3-0 home defeat to Chelsea after Marinakis acted during the match itself. Dyche secured six victories from 18 league games, was nominated for January’s Manager of the Month award, and briefly moved the club above the relegation zone, but performances deteriorated steadily and the relationship between manager and squad became untenable.
Senior players communicated to Marinakis directly their dissatisfaction with Dyche’s training methods, and the owner acted decisively, dismissing Dyche during the early hours of Thursday morning, approximately three hours after the final whistle of the 0-0 home draw against bottom-placed Wolverhampton Wanderers. The City Ground crowd had already delivered their verdict, booing the team off the pitch at full time.
The goalless draw summed up Forest’s current plight. Twelve matches remain, three points separate the club from the relegation zone, and the squad that finished 17th last season has shown nothing to suggest a dramatic reversal of fortune is imminent.
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Pereira was identified within 48 hours of Dyche’s exit and the deal was concluded rapidly, with the club’s familiarity with the manager providing a shortcut through negotiations that might otherwise have taken weeks. Pereira’s prior relationship with Marinakis proved the critical factor in his appointment. The two worked together at Olympiacos in 2015, with Pereira delivering a league and cup double for the Greek club in his six months in charge before departing. That shared history gave Marinakis a baseline of trust in a manager he had seen perform under pressure at close range.
The City Ground role is Pereira’s 15th managerial appointment across a career that began with Sanjoanense in Portugal in 2004 and has since taken him across Germany, China, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. His most notable achievement remains back-to-back Portuguese league titles with Porto in 2011-12 and 2012-13, a period that established his reputation before a series of shorter appointments accumulated. He has stayed beyond two years at only one of his previous clubs.
His most recent appointment in England, the Wolverhampton Wanderers job he took in December 2024, produced the result for which he is most likely to be remembered in the Premier League: Pereira inherited a Wolves side rooted at the bottom of the table and kept them up on the final day of the 2024-25 season, a survival achievement that directly influenced Forest’s decision to appoint him. His second season in the Midlands was catastrophic, however, with Wolves collecting only two points from their first ten league matches before he was sacked in November 2025.
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Dyche’s entire backroom staff, including Ian Woan and Steve Stone, both Forest legends who had returned to the club with him, departed alongside him. Pereira has assembled a completely new coaching group, with Filipe Jorge Monteiro Almeida and Luis Miguel Moreira Da Silva joining as assistants, and Bruno Filipe Araujo De Moura appointed as Head of Physical Performance and Opposition Analysis. A goalkeeper coach appointment was not confirmed in the initial announcement, with Wayne Hennessey expected to continue in that capacity in the interim.
Pereira’s first test arrives on Thursday when Forest face Fenerbahce away in the first leg of the Europa League knockout playoff round — a match that carries its own irony given that Fenerbahce is one of his former clubs. He managed the Turkish giants between 2021 and 2022 before being dismissed. Forest’s following Premier League fixture is a home game against Liverpool on Sunday February 22.
Forest are three points above West Ham, who have recovered significantly in recent weeks and represent the most immediate threat below the current relegation boundary. With 12 games remaining, the mathematics of survival remain manageable for a squad containing significant quality, but the psychological weight of persistent managerial change and a fanbase that has run out of patience creates conditions that have overwhelmed more stable clubs.
Whether Pereira can replicate his Wolves rescue act in different circumstances remains the central question. At Wolves he inherited a clear identity, a team that needed stabilizing, and produced results quickly before running out of ideas in his second year. Forest’s situation is more complex, with a squad assembled by multiple managers under conflicting philosophies and a dressing room that has cycled through four sets of ideas in seven months.
The 18-month contract represents a notable commitment by Marinakis’s standards, suggesting the owner is seeking an extended period of stability after the revolving door of the current campaign. Whether Pereira’s track record of short tenures will be broken at the City Ground, or whether the club will be addressing a fifth managerial change before the end of 2026, may depend entirely on whether they are still playing Premier League football next season.
