From Brazil to Belgrade: Those who found Nottingham Forest’s stars – what they felt then, and now

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It is the group of players who have taken Nottingham Forest to their first European odyssey for 30 years.

The Athletic wanted to do something special to mark Forest’s achievement and celebrate the players who have brought modern-day success to the club who won successive European Cups — the previous, straight-knockout guise of what has since become the Champions League — under Brian Clough in 1979 and 1980.

We have found many of the scouts — the talent-spotters, often unseen, always looking for the game’s stars of tomorrow — who could take credit for discovering each Forest player. Or, where that has not been possible, our writers have tracked down the stories about how each member of Nuno’s regular first XI, and frequent squad players, got their big break, sometimes when they were as young as six or seven.

From Nigeria to New Zealand, Lincoln to London, Salvador to Sao Paulo, Wrexham to Whitley Bay, these are the people who knew the youngsters before they became global stars.

You might not know their names, and you wouldn’t recognise them in the street, but they were there at the start of everything.

And it all begins on the side of a windswept pitch in Staffordshire, a county in the heart of England …

Morgan Gibbs-White — Brian Punter

Brian Punter, who played for Wolverhampton Wanderers against Manchester United in the 1953 FA Youth Cup final, spotted Morgan Gibbs-White playing for Stafford Juniors Under-10s.

I still have the scouting report — September 28, 2008 — from the Mid-Staffs Junior League tournament where I saw Morgan for the first time. It was a Sunday morning at the Monckton Recreation Centre in Penkridge. He was eight years old, smaller than the other boys, but he was running the game. He set himself up for a header and I thought, ‘Christ, he even heads the ball like a professional’.

I gave up scouting the following year to look after my wife, Barbara, who had Alzheimer’s. Barbara died in 2018. It was a really difficult period in my life and I didn’t have time to be looking for players.

Over the years, though, I followed Morgan’s progress and, when he broke into the Wolves first team, I wrote to the club to say I’d love to see him play and ‘would it be possible to send me a couple of tickets?’. I never got a reply and, in the end, I gave up. It seemed like they had forgotten all about me.

Brian Punter with Gibbs-White (credit: Brian Punter)

Thankfully, Morgan hadn’t. Earlier this season, he got to hear about it. He was passed my number and, completely out of the blue, rang to invite me to the Wolves-Forest match at Molineux in January. How to make an 89-year-old man happy! I took my grandson. Forest won 3-0. Morgan scored the first and, after the match, he gave me his shirt. It was a proud day for me — but, b****y hell, Wolves miss him.

Daniel Taylor

Nikola Milenkovic — Nikola Jelic

Nikola Jelic was a coach at a Belgrade youth football team called OFK Zarkovo, when a six-year-old Nikola Milenkovic arrived for a trial. Years later, Jelic was the one who recommended Milenkovic to Partizan Belgrade…

A young freckled boy came to training, brought along by his sister Jelena, who was two years older and already training with us. She was very quick and talented. Even in those first sessions, Nikola stood out for his incredible bravery when going up against older boys. What really caught my eye was that, unlike most kids his age, he wasn’t afraid to head the ball.

Interestingly, his mother initially forbade him from training because she thought he was too young — he was only six. But after a chance encounter with me, she changed her mind and allowed him to return.

In my team, he also covered right‑back when needed and even featured as a right winger. For a period, I used him as a defensive midfielder to sharpen his technical abilities and prepare him for future challenges. But it was always clear his natural role was at centre‑back.

Because he excelled in every position I asked him to play, I nicknamed him Bleki, a name he still carries with him today. It means someone who is strong and fearlessly charges at every obstacle.

He has stayed exactly the same. Fame and success haven’t altered him — he still wears that same bright smile he had as a child and has always been humble and well‑liked by his team-mates.

I’m immensely proud. I’ve worked with many players who went on to earn international caps, but I’ve never encountered a character like his. I follow every one of his matches, but nothing compares to the pride I feel when he pulls on the Serbia shirt.

Whenever he’s back in Belgrade, he always comes to our Zarkovo academy, inspiring over 600 boys who train there daily and dream of becoming the next Nikola Milenkovic. He never forgets his roots.

Jelic (back) with Milenkovic (circled) at OFK Zarkovo (credit: Nikola Jelic)

Nick Miller

Neco Williams — Ian and Dave Richardson

Ian Richardson, then Liverpool’s scout in north Wales, discovered a seven-year-old Neco Williams playing as a striker for his village team, Cefn United, in a 2008 tournament in Gresford, near Wrexham. Richardson died in 2021, aged 78. His son, Dave, takes up the story…

I’ve still got the Liverpool umbrella my dad used to take on some of his assignments, sheltering from the rain by the side of the pitch at countless matches.

Dad knew he was attending those games as an ambassador for Liverpool. He’d wear an official Liverpool coat, take notes from the side of the pitch. If the subject was football, he could chew your ear off. He just loved watching, and talking about, football.

He was looking for players with good technical ability and Neco ticked the boxes. He knew how to pass and to play, he could protect the ball and handle himself.

Rummaging through some of Dad’s old stuff recently, I also found his scouting report on Neco for the Welsh Football Trust, three years after the schoolboy had joined Liverpool’s academy. Neco got mostly A marks, meaning ‘potential national squad’, for his football skills and it was interesting to see what my dad had written in his report. “On the small side but has good pace … plays on right or left … good going forward but will track back.”

Manchester United also wanted him. Other clubs were keen, too. But my dad was always very friendly and amicable and he was regarded as a trusted face in the football community. He liked to speak to the parents and maybe it counted in Liverpool’s favour that, being so affable, he put the club in a good light.

Dad had been a bank manager in (north Wales towns) Rhos-on-Sea and Mold. He retired in his early fifties and that was when he started scouting for Liverpool. Dad had made a lot of friends in the football world from watching me (Dave was at various lower-league clubs such as Marine and Morecambe) and he clearly had an eye for a player.

As well as Neco, it was my dad’s scouting that took Danny Ward, Harry Wilson and Ben Woodburn to Liverpool — four boys who went on to become Wales internationals. It might have been five, courtesy of Dylan Levitt, because Dad recommended him too. Liverpool decided against taking him on. So Dylan went to Manchester United instead and has also represented Wales during a career that now sees him playing for Scottish top-flight team Hibernian.

Daniel Taylor

Ryan Yates — Terry Bourne

Nottingham Forest FC

Terry Bourne was Forest’s regional scout for the neighbouring county of Lincolnshire, as well as running the club’s development centre in Grantham, one of its largest towns…

Ryan was playing for a team called Cherry Colts in Lincoln. He was a centre-forward. He was just far superior to any other player on the pitch. In only a few minutes, you could see he had got something.

It was an under-eights game and I approached his dad, Andy, and, before I had really spoken, he said, ‘I need to stop you, he is a year younger than everyone else, he is playing a year up.’ That stopped me in my tracks. We had to wait a year until he was an under-eight to get him into the development centre at Grantham. That was it, really. He went into the pre-academy very quickly.

He had that never-say-die attitude even when he was seven or eight. He would run through a brick wall. He was talented. He could strike a ball very cleanly and powerfully.

I remember watching him in one under-eights game, he hit a shot that hammered against the bar and bounced back. Yatesy threw himself in to head the rebound — which he did — but he went through absolutely everything in his way to get there… defenders, the goalkeeper… he even managed to knock the goal over. The actual goal fell over, with people rolling around in the back of the net. The keeper was lying on the ground in tears.

The referee disallowed the goal, and Yatesy was just running back to the halfway line with that look he still does now, with his arms out as if to say, ‘Oh my god.’

His attitude is brilliant.

He went to Barrow on loan (joining the then non-League side in August 2016 at age 18), under Paul Cox, basically because Paul had come to watch a Forest Under-21s game against Crystal Palace. (Palace’s Wales international midfielder) Joe Ledley had been out for a year with injury and it was his first 45 minutes back… Yatesy just ran around the City Ground and kicked Joe whenever he got on the ball. I can remember Joe coming off the pitch and asking me, ‘Who is your No 8?’. I thought he was going to moan. But what he actually said was, ‘He has got a right chance, he has.’

He went to Barrow and Paul was ringing (Forest’s then academy head) Gary Brazil, asking him to call Yatesy to tell him to go home, because the staff were wanting to lock up the gym and he was still in there. He just wanted to do extra work all the time.

Now he is a Premier League captain, on the verge of playing in Europe. He has had a lot of unnecessary stick over the years; lots of people have doubted him. But what I would say is that, since Martin O’Neill gave him his chance, every Forest manager since has picked him. He is the only one left from the side that won promotion from the Championship in 2022.

I am still in touch with Ryan. He gave me the shirt he wore in the play-offs. It is the way he is. My partner and two lads are season-ticket holders and if he sees them, he will always have a chat. He is like that with people. I do feel a sense of pride in the small part I played. But he has got himself where he is.

Paul Taylor

Callum Hudson-Odoi — Bert Dawkins

Bert Dawkins, who has had two spells at Charlton Athletic as the south-east London club’s academy recruitment manager, was the first to hear about an eight-year-old Callum Hudson-Odoi…

When Callum was 10, I predicted he would play for England. Honestly, he was that good. He could play with both feet, he was mobile, he could get around players and, even at that age, he could strike the ball so cleanly. He had the X factor.

One of our guys had seen this boy training in the park at Colliers Wood (a district of south London). Word got back to me and my first reaction was, ‘Bring him in. Let’s get him in as soon as possible.’ I had a chat with his parents on the phone and, as soon as Callum walked through the door, we knew we had a special player on our hands. After our first training session, I just remember thinking, ‘Wow! OMG!’

Bert Dawkins with Hudson-Odoi (credit: Bert Dawkins)

To begin with, he was just training with us. But when we started playing against other teams, word got out. Suddenly, everyone knew about him. Then, six weeks before we were meant to sign him, Callum ended up going to Chelsea. Unfortunately for us, there’s a long list of players who started with us but moved to bigger clubs. But we’re still proud that Callum started here and we have a part in his story.

We have watched him grow as a player and as a man. I’m still close to Callum’s family. I speak to Callum’s dad, Bismark, who was a former player himself and a Ghana international. And I was right about Callum playing for England, wasn’t I? He played for England at every age level before reaching the senior team, aged 18.

Daniel Taylor

Murillo — Gustavo Almeida

Murillo playing for Corinthians Under-17s in 2018 (Rodrigo Gazzanel/Agência Corinthians)

We knew him because he played for Uniao Barbarense and was really good against us. What happened was that Murillo’s representative at that time was very close to the president of Corinthians, Andres Sanchez. He was already going for a trial at Sao Paulo, but his desire was to play for (city rivals) Corinthians, so he came for a three-week trial with us and we signed him.

When I first saw him in training, I knew he could help us because he could play as a central defender, left-back and in central midfield. His power, technique and will to improve were very impressive. But he had a long way to go in terms of training and development. He became a top player during this process.

His will to win and especially his confidence and work rate were very high. Also, he was very polite and respected everyone — staff and players. Even in the under-20s, when he was not getting as many chances to train with the first team, he didn’t change a bit, kept working very hard, improving, and when the chance came, he was ready.

I loved to work one vs one, two vs two in training, and he always put in so much intensity. So many times, he was the top scorer — he would get the ball, dribble and score.

I’m very proud to see how he has developed because it is what we always tell the boys: it’s not only about talent, it’s about how much you love the process of improvement. There are many talented guys in Brazil but only a few have the passion to work hard and improve as a person and a player. Murillo is the example.

Nick Miller

Elliot Anderson — John Forrest

Anderson in action for Wallsend Boys Club (credit: John Forrest)

John Forrest was Elliot Anderson’s coach at Wallsend Boys Club when he was spotted by Newcastle United — by John Kirkley, the same scout who previously discovered future England hero Paul Gascoigne — before joining their academy at the age of eight…

We had a great team, because we also had Cameron Gascoigne in the team — Gazza’s nephew. It was hard for the other lads to get the ball off him at times. He was a lot like his uncle. Paul would sometimes turn up and help out with the coaching of the team.

But it was Elliot who often stood out. He was always a very quiet lad so I made him captain for a while, just to give him a bit of responsibility. We moved him around into different positions, but he always wanted to play in the centre of midfield. Even at that age, he had that edge to him. You just see it in some kids, they are fearless. They go into tackles without really thinking about it. Some kids have it, others do not. He had it.

Anderson with the player of the year trophy (credit: John Forrest)

The club has a long history of players coming through, including Michael Carrick, Peter Beardsley, Alan Shearer… but the club has always been about producing good young men, as well as footballers. Elliot is definitely that. He still comes back to help with the club’s awards nights.

Elliot, when he was little, he just had something about him. That little spark, that ability to fearlessly do anything on the pitch. His grandad, Geoff Allen, played for Newcastle in the 1960s, so he clearly had it in his blood. He was playing up an age group, so Newcastle had to wait a year to sign him when he was eight. But they were always there watching him, for a long time. He stood out. The scouts would ask about him all the time.

Elliot had a knack for popping up in the right place at the right time to score goals. He knew where to be. I thought about that when he scored against Tottenham recently.

I remember his parents always being really supportive. His dad coached another team at Whitley Bay, but he wanted Elliot to be part of Wallsend. It was great to see a local lad go right through the Newcastle academy. It was sad when he ended up being on the wrong end of the PSR (profit and sustainability) rules, which forced Newcastle to sell him.

Forest got themselves a gem.

Paul Taylor

Danilo — Dego Freitas

Danilo got his big break with Palmeiras in Brazil, signing for them aged 17. But that was after a dispiriting period when he almost quit football altogether, before eventually being persuaded to persist by Dego Freitas, a coach and scout who ran a project called Os Deguinhos da Bola, which helped disadvantaged kids through football, for whom Danilo played. He was one of the few to spot his talent…

In 2012, when Danilo joined my project, I knew that he would become a professional player. He has always been very entertaining. He always liked to chat. He was always a very technical player, very dominant in the midfield. We rarely lost with him on the field.

When he was released by Bahia (a club in Salvador, capital of Bahia state), around 2013 or 2014, he thought about giving up, and I convinced him to stay. I told him that he had to honour his father and his family. Thank God, he persisted and managed to become a professional player.

Speaking to The Athletic for another article earlier this year, Freitas added: I told him that it was his family’s dream, and my dream, that he could help the family with football. No one in Bahia knew how to recognise his talent, but Palmeiras saw the boy’s potential. He had to leave the state to achieve his dream. But he did it!

Danilo with Os Deguinhos da Bola (credit: Dego Freitas)

There was a game where it ended in a draw and went to extra time. Danilo played so well that he had two assists in extra time. His father wanted me to take him off because he was too tired. When it was over, Danilo had to leave the field with help, he had no strength to walk.

He is a very quiet person but was born to shine. I am happy for him and his family, and I still keep in touch with him whenever I can.

Nick Miller

Ola Aina — Darren Salmon

The credit for discovering Ola Aina goes to a former Chelsea scout, Dave Pummell. Yet his whereabouts today are something of a mystery. Chelsea’s current scouting staff have been unable to locate him and, despite writing to every Dave Pummell in London and the Home Counties (all 14 of them), The Athletic has not been able to find our man. Not yet, anyway.

We have, however, tracked down Darren Salmon, Aina’s first-ever coach with LTD Comets in Essex, a county just east of Greater London. Salmon remembers the day, 20 years ago, when the schoolboy Aina came to Chelsea’s attention…

LTD stands for Little Thurrock Dynamos. I was manager of the Comets B team, and when seven-year-old Ola came to training for the first time I nearly turned him away. One of his friends was already in the team and Ola wanted to join in. “We don’t really have space for any new players,” I remember thinking.

A couple of the other coaches suggested we should make room for him, and very quickly it became clear Ola had a lot of natural talent. We were playing on mini-soccer pitches and he had one particular party trick when he would try to catch out the opposing goalkeeper by shooting straight from kick-off. It told us a lot about him – good fun, a bit cheeky, always playing with a smile on his face.

Ola also went on to represent Essex at athletics and became national junior long-jump champion.

He was big for his age. We played him at right midfield and, being so skilful and athletic, it would often draw some comments from opposing managers along lines of, “What’s his real age, then?”. They were suspicious that we were fielding a player who was too old to be playing in the under-nines or under-10s. It was never true. But we’d have to make a joke about it to defuse the situation. “Good player, isn’t he?,” I’d say. “Did you see him pull up on his moped earlier?”.

We trained on a piece of land behind Blackshots Leisure Centre in Thurrock and one summer the team were invited to play in a football festival at the Butlin’s resort in Bognor Regis (a town on England’s south coast).

That was when Ola was spotted.

He won an award as the tournament’s best player and I was approached by two scouts asking for permission to speak to his parents. One scout was from (nearby club) Portsmouth, the other from Chelsea. Ola went for trials at Chelsea and that was the start of his journey — from LTD Comets in the Essex Thundermite Youth League to the Premier League.

Daniel Taylor

Anthony Elanga — Derek Langley

Anthony Elanga had already been in the junior system at Swedish clubs Elfsborg and Malmo before moving to Hyde, on the outskirts of Manchester, with his mother and two sisters in 2013. His first team in England was Hattersley FC’s under-12s, and that’s where Derek Langley, Manchester United’s head of academy recruitment, got to hear about him…

A long time ago, I was working as a regional manager for British Telecom. One of the lads I got to know was called Ged Coyne, a former footballer from Manchester. His son wanted to be a scout at Manchester United and he rang me out of the blue one day. “My dad’s asked me to call you,” he said, “There’s a kid here at Hattersley, he’s just got off the plane from Sweden and we think he’s a player, would you have a look at him?”.

I told him, “If he’s as good as you think, we will take him straight away.” I went to the next Hattersley game and, as soon as I saw Anthony, it was a case of, ‘Wow — we’ve got a player here’.”

From @hattersley_fc to @ManUtd what a story. Anthony Elanga #1Family 🔴⚪🔴⚪ pic.twitter.com/UJfr38wBQR

— HattersleyFC (@hattersley_fc) May 11, 2021

When you see a lad with Anthony’s talent, you recognise it straight away. He had all the characteristics we wanted: athleticism, excellent feet, speed, technical quality. He was very energetic and he had that ability to glide across the pitch, drop his shoulder and go past his man. You could see instantly he would fit into our model at United.

We had to prove to the authorities that we hadn’t enticed the family over from Sweden. That took a bit of time, but it was worth the trouble. He was a great kid, his mum was lovely too, and even at the age of 11 he had that mix of speed and ball control — that was something incredible recently when he scored against United and they clocked him running 85 metres in nine seconds with the ball at his feet.

Daniel Taylor

Chris Wood — Roger Wilkinson

In 2007, Roger Wilkinson was coaching at Hamilton Wanderers in New Zealand when a 15-year-old Chris Wood arrived at the club…

Even at that age, ‘Woodsy’ was part of our first team. He was big and strong for his age and he quickly became a key player for Hamilton because of his ability to score goals.

The great thing about Woodsy is that he has never been full of himself. He’s always been a hard worker. And he was a natural goalscorer. Even if he wasn’t having the best of games, as soon as the ball arrived in and around the box, he’d come alive. It was like magic. He’d find a yard — or make a yard — and the ball would end up in the net. I’d never seen anything quite like it.

Chris Wood at Hamilton Wanderers (credit: Hamilton Wanderers)

I was going back and forth to England because I had coaching links with West Bromwich Albion and, through that, I was able to set him up for a trial. The great thing was that Tony Mowbray, West Brom’s manager at the time, recognised straight away that Woodsy had got something. They wanted to sign him straight away and, by the age of 17, he was in their first team.

Chris was very lucky that he had really supportive parents, too. A lot of lads go over to England from New Zealand and get homesick because it’s quite difficult to fit in. With Woodsy, however, his mum, Julie, went with him. That helped him settle in and, since then, he hasn’t really looked back.

Everyone in New Zealand is proud of him.

Daniel Taylor

Taiwo Awoniyi — Seyi Olofinjana

Taiwo Awoniyi was playing for an academy side in Ilorin, Nigeria, when he was spotted by the former Wolves, Stoke City and Hull City midfielder Seyi Olofinjana, who ran the Imperial Football Academy, established to work with Nigerian youngsters, polish their skills and prepare them for a career playing in Europe…

Even before Taiwo became anything, there was this aura around him that just oozed ‘It’s a matter of time before I do something in this sport.’ So when you have that combination, plus talent…I mean, success is inevitable.

He was a young man with a good hunger and passion for the game. For me, that trumps talent. From the very first day we set eyes on him, he seemed to love the game. He’s one of the very few players that I thought, ‘If football doesn’t give him XYZ (success, money and other material things), he would still play football.’

We had been monitoring Taiwo through his youth team, under a coach called Rasaq Olojo. He helped him immensely when he was young. He was a mentor, and a father figure to him.

He’s definitely a bit more refined now: he was very raw back then. We worked on his ball-striking and ball retention. We knew he would score goals, he could run, he’s always had his athleticism, but the other elements of his game had to be refined.

A lot of work was done by the national team, too. He spent time with us, but he played for all of their age groups. Liverpool (who signed Awoniyi in 2015) spotted him playing for the national team at that year’s Under-20 World Cup.

Seeing him right now, compared to what he was like all those years ago, he’s still the same guy. Still the same belief, still the same love for the game. I’m not surprised he is where he is. I think his faith is where his confidence comes from. It’s a big, big part of his life. He’s a good friend, we’re still very close.

Nick Miller

Matz Sels — Luc Sels

And then there was one: Forest’s No 1, to be precise. Our photograph of a young Matz Sels is supplied by his father, Luc, a souvenir of the days when they were both involved with a junior side called Koninklijke Kontich FC, based near the Belgian city of Antwerp. And, as Luc recalls, a scout by the name of Dirk Gyselinckx was watching for a local top-flight club, Lierse SK…

I was the assistant manager and I still remember Matz telling me, ‘I want to be your goalkeeper.’ He was six years old and he had learned to play football from a very young age, but not just as a goalkeeper. On Saturdays, he would play in goal. Then on Sundays, he would play in another team as a striker — the target man. Maybe he got that from me. When I was younger, I also played as a striker … though never as a goalkeeper.

Matz had been at Kontich for a year when he was seen by a scout, Dirk Gyselincks, who lived locally. Dirk had been watching us play in a tournament. He asked if Matz would like to go to Lierse for the next year and, as we lived in Lint, just a few miles away, it was not too far to travel.

Matz started with Lierse’s under-sevens, playing in seven-a-side matches on small pitches, and he stayed with the club all the way until he made it into the first team.

As for Dirk, he went on to scout for Anderlecht (where he recommended the Brussels club sign a 13-year-old Romelu Lukaku, now the Belgium national team’s record goalscorer, from Lierse’s youth system). All this was over 20 years ago, and I haven’t seen Dirk for a long time. But we were always grateful for his part in Matz’s story, from a small team in Kontich all the way to Nottingham Forest.

Daniel Taylor

This news was originally published on this post .

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