There are fixtures you look at in August and your stomach just drops. Not from excitement. Not from dread exactly. Something more complicated and harder to name. City Ground, 5 September. You see it on the calendar and the whole of March comes back in one go — not because we lost there, but because of what came after. Because of what it means now that we're going back.
March was the month everything came apart. Three managers in one season. Tudor sacked on the 29th after a 3-0 home defeat to Forest, and then the news about his father coming through after the final whistle, and the whole thing sitting in your chest for days because even by our standards that was a lot to process. That was a lot to carry. We don't know what Tudor was feeling in that dugout at N17. We shouldn't pretend to. But we know what it looked like from where we were watching — screens, living rooms, pubs, the collected exhaustion of a supporter base that had already been through everything and was running very low on the reserves you need to absorb something like that.
Forest 3, Spurs 0. And underneath that: all the rest of it. Forty-one points at the end. Two above West Ham who went down. A relegation brush we felt on our skin. And now, five months later, we're going back to Nottingham.
We spent the summer of 2026 dropping £237m on players we hope can hold together a project that still feels like it's being built on ground that keeps shifting underneath.
Roberto De Zerbi came in on 31 March and did enough in seven games to keep us up. Just. Then the summer hit — £100m for Sandro Tonali, £85m for Mateus Fernandes, Jan Paul van Hecke in from Brighton because he already knows what De Zerbi wants from a centre-back. Over £237m in total. Club record. By some distance. And the honest answer is: we don't know yet. We genuinely don't.
Tonali looks the part in the glimpses we've had. There's a player in there who has seen real pressure — the ban, the comeback, the scrutiny that followed him back into football at Newcastle. He came through it. That matters. Not as a story but as a fact about what he's made of. If he's playing at City Ground on the 5th and we go a goal down, we want to know there's someone in that midfield who doesn't fold. Someone who holds the shape.
Fernandes is 22 now and either going to be extraordinary or going to need three seasons we might not have patience for. Van Hecke is the one who actually calms you down a little — he's been built for this system, he understands the positional language De Zerbi speaks. But understanding and executing are different things when the Premier League starts in earnest and the press traps aren't closing and the goalkeeper is being asked to pass out under pressure from teams who have spent their summer working out how to stop exactly that.
Robertson at left back is fine, probably. Thirty-two, nine years at Liverpool, 378 appearances, lost his place to Kerkez but still — he knows the Premier League, knows what it means to defend at the highest level. Whether he can do the job De Zerbi actually needs done, with the runs and the high line and the defensive recovery at speed, we'll see. He might be brilliant. He might look a little like a player who's arrived one system too late. That's not cruelty. That's just age and football being what they are.
De Zerbi's football demands things from a squad. It demands composure. It demands players who don't panic when the shape stretches or the press gets bypassed. It demands, more than anything, belief in the system when the system looks like it might be about to collapse. We've never been great at that. Not recently. Not for a long time. We have a way of wobbling, of holding together until the moment it matters and then not holding together. You know the feeling. You've seen it enough times.
What we keep coming back to, though, isn't the transfer business or the system questions or even the Forest fixture specifically. It's the feeling of trying again. That's the thing. We spent 17 years without a trophy and then we won the Europa League in Bilbao — Brennan Johnson, one goal, Manchester United, the whole improbable thing — and then we sacked the manager who won it, had three managers in a season, nearly went down, and spent the summer dropping a quarter of a billion quid on players we hope can hold together a project that still feels like it's being built on ground that keeps shifting underneath.
City Ground, 5 September. It's not the worst fixture to start with. It's not the easiest either. It's just the fixture that makes you remember March, and remember how fragile it all felt when we were staring down the barrel. Before the money. Before the new manager had seven games to prove himself. Before we knew if any of this was actually going to work.
We're going back. We're going back and we're hoping the new shape holds. That's all any of us are doing right now. Hoping.