Marinakis calls the tune at Nottingham Forest – but what is his endgame? | Jonathan Liew

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I feel a rush everywhere when I see you You become a silent scream In the mind, in the body, in the secret momentsAnd in the lost logic In your kiss, in your embrace In the curse and the blessing We will all burn together

Exapsi (Excitement), vocals by Natasa Theodoridou, lyrics by Evangelos Marinakis.

And let’s be real, we’re not getting that from Avram Glazer any time soon. Evangelos Marinakis is by no means the first Premier League owner labouring under the impression that his skilled business acumen automatically confers him a certain genius in other fields. Nor is he the first owner with pretensions to artistry and cultural influence. Even so, it takes a particular rarefied level of hubris to write a literal pop single for a literal pop singer, a single recorded and released with what you have to say is quite a sexy video (mercifully, not featuring Marinakis).

“Marinakis, he does what he wants,” Nottingham Forest fans sang earlier this season, as the club’s courtroom battle over Crystal Palace’s Europa League place reached its bitter climax. And a few years ago what Marinakis wanted was to write the theme song to the Greek TV drama Exapsi, being screened on his Mega TV channel. Nobody would have thought any less of him had he chosen not to do this. Nobody would have quibbled had he decided to leave the job to a more experienced lyricist. But in music, as in football, and shipping, and politics, and philanthropy, Big Vange is a character who very much likes to be across things.

Doubtless Sean Dyche will discover this soon enough, as did his predecessors in the Forest ejector seat. Nuno Espírito Santo’s relationship with the owner went into sharp decline towards the end of last season, around the time the club’s Champions League challenge began to tail off, and never remotely recovered. Ange Postecoglou’s quest to win a trophy in his second season collapsed in its second month. Now it falls to Dyche to lift Forest out of the bottom three, and resurrect their Europa League campaign, impose his blood-and-snot style of football on a squad that has spent the past five weeks being drilled in what in many ways is its polar opposite.

Naturally there are legitimate questions over direction and identity here, the apparent incoherence of a strategy that lurches from low block to high block to everywhere block in the space of six weeks. And on the face of things Nuno to Ange to Utter Woke Nonsense feels totally illogical, a recipe for disaster. But it makes more sense if instead we see the modern Forest as a project not of its coaches but its quixotic owner. The ideology is Marinakis. The playing style is Marinakis. Even the tweets and the official club statements are Marinakis. Marinakis exerts an influence over every area of the club in a way that few owners in the modern era can remotely replicate.

This is perhaps the defining note of Forest’s eight years under the stewardship of their outsized shipping magnate owner. Don’t try to spot a pattern or philosophy in the nine permanent managers employed in that time (Mark Warburton, Aitor Karanka, Martin O’Neill, Sabri Lamouchi, Chris Hughton, Steve Cooper, Nuno, Postecoglou, Dyche). There isn’t one. The one constant here is expendability, chaos, disruption, the furious pace of recruitment, the conveyor belt of agents, the idea that this 160-year-old football club now exists entirely as a suburb of one man and his planetary-sized main character energy.

Evangelos Marinakis (talks to Nuno Espírito Santo on the pitch after Nottingham Forest’s draw with Leicester in May
Evangelos Marinakis (left) has an exchange of views with Nuno Espírito Santo on the pitch after Nottingham Forest’s draw with Leicester in May. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

On its own, this would be enough to mark Marinakis out in a league of shell companies, opaque funds and absentee owners who have made comfortably more appearances on Forbes rich lists than they have in their own stadiums. Who actually writes the cheques at Chelsea? Who actually makes the decisions at Newcastle? Where was Sheikh Mansour at the weekend? Few know, and most of those aren’t saying. By degrees, and over decades, English football acquiesced to the idea of the owner as phantasm, a jumble of numbers on paper.

At Forest, by contrast, there is little ambiguity over any of this. We know who writes the cheques. We know, by and large, where the money comes from: mainly big boats and a media empire. And while the likes of Silvio Berlusconi at Milan and Florentino Pérez at Real Madrid have enjoyed similar levels of profile and influence, Marinakis represents a relatively new phenomenon at the top end of the Premier League: the first club where the owner is basically the big show, the star attraction and main character, its voice and its philosophy and its personality. In an August interview, Morgan Gibbs-White even cited Marinakis as the main reason for the club’s dressing-room culture.

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Perhaps there is a certain cultural dissonance here. In Greek football it has long been common for owners to reimagine clubs in their own image, to stride on to the pitch at full time, to make outspoken public pronouncements on match officials and administrators. Partly, too, this is a projection of power as much as its exercise, the sense that football is simply another sphere to be influenced and shaped by their own force of will. How many owners would go to the lengths of banning a specific pundit, as happened to Sky’s Gary Neville towards the end of last season?

The really interesting question here is what the Marinakis endgame looks like. In their public statements Forest have made no secret of their disdain for existing institutions and structures: PGMO, VAR, the Premier League and its rules on profitability and sustainability. In football, as in his other ventures, the Marinakis playbook is built on disruption, innovation, the exercise of all available avenues of influence in order to get what he wants: money, the media, the law.

How far will he go to establish Forest as a force? What will he be prepared to break in the process? Well, as a great songwriter once wrote: in the lost logic, in your kiss, in your embrace, in the curse and the blessing, we will all burn together.

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