Amber Wildgust’s early Nottingham Forest Women experience was almost biblical.
In the beginning, there was Before the Centre of Excellence.
That was a time when the women’s team (then called Nottingham Forest Ladies) were not associated with Forest’s professional men’s club, when the pitches they played on were borrowed (from non-League side Basford United), and when Wildgust’s mother washed the kits, her father was the manager and their family car served as a team bus.
At that point, in the early 2000s, the closest a nine-year-old Wildgust, who would go on to be appointed Forest’s head of women’s and girls football in July 2023, got to appearing at the City Ground in her playing kit “was when we were bucket-collecting outside a men’s game”.
Then came the Time of the Centre of Excellence.
It was awarded to Forest Ladies by the English Football Association (FA) and, according to Wildgust, brought pathways, qualified coaches and funding from the men’s branch of the club. Wildgust, by then a teenager, began ticking off her coaching badges and working with the girls’ under-10s and under-16s as the women’s senior squad rose to the FA Women’s Premier League, the highest level of the domestic football pyramid.
Then came After the Centre of Excellence.
The FA reduced the number of centres of excellence in England from 50 to 32 before the 2011-12 season as part of a restructuring of women’s and girls’ football. While the governing body announced the creation of 30 player development centres for the future, Forest Ladies’ application to keep their centre of excellence status was rejected. Reading, Watford, Ipswich Town and Charlton Athletic were other casualties.
Life at Forest Ladies became a blur of things crumbling fast.
In the two years that followed, Forest’s applications to join the new Women’s Super League (WSL) were rejected in favour of local rivals Lincoln City Ladies. Forest Ladies missed out on not only a minimum £100,000 ($130,000 at current rates) of FA funding but also saw their status as a top-flight club removed, turning the challenge of securing much-needed sponsorship into a near impossibility.
In 2012, Omar Al-Hasawi, the Forest club chairman at the time, promised to continue funding the women’s team amid their financial struggles, but before the 2013-14 season, that flow of money stopped, leaving the future of women’s football in Nottingham in the lurch for the next four years.
Omar Al-Hasawi, left, with his cousins Abdulaziz Al-Hasawi and Fawaz Al-Hasawi, Forest’s owner at the time, in 2012 (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
Aspiring players left for neighbouring development hubs in Leicester, Sheffield and Birmingham.
Not until 2019, two years after Evangelos Marinakis’ takeover at Forest, were the women’s team incorporated into the main club.
“I was only 18 when we lost the licence,” remembers Wildgust. She left to play for Loughborough University in Leicestershire, later becoming general manager at Aston Villa and Watford, then director of football at London City Lionesses, before rejoining Forest almost two years ago.
“Those memories are what made me want to come back to Nottingham,” she says. “I wanted to come back to get the women’s team promoted into the Women’s Super League and make sure we have a really strong girls’ academy, that we’re producing players who go on to play for Forest, that we don’t lose our talent.”
Wildgust speaks with convincing fervour. She has just cause. Forest are a nice club to be at right now.
Coach Nuno Espirito Santo’s men’s side are through to the FA Cup quarter-finals later this month and have Champions League qualification for next season within their grasp. And next Saturday, March 22, the women face their Stoke City counterparts in the final of the National League Cup, a knockout competition open to the 72 teams that make up steps three and four in the English women’s pyramid.
Forest Women have 23 of their 24 players operating on full-time professional contracts (captain Lyndsey Harkin declined such a deal for undisclosed personal reasons) and, thanks to their 2-0 away win against promotion rivals Burnley last week, head coach Carly Davies’ squad sit two points clear at the top of the north section of the National League Premier Division — the third tier — with a game in hand on second-placed Wolverhampton Wanderers.
The vibes are good, the wind in Forest sails.
While Forest’s women are not wading in entirely unfamiliar territory — they won the title two years ago but failed to beat Watford in the promotion play-off final — they arrive at the frontier this time better equipped.
“We’re an ambitious club,” says Wildgust. “People are surprised about where the men are, but people in the club aren’t, because a lot of hard work has gone into that. That’s true of the women’s team also. It’s not an overnight thing. We’ve been investing in women’s sport for a long time. And in five years, people will know we are ambitious.”
Head coach Davies, left, with captain Harkin (Nottingham Forest FC)
Kate Longhurst had experienced ‘the tour’ at other clubs before: the training facilities, the shiny new data tools, the canteen with a personal chef and freshly-made gnocchi, the hulking main stadium. “And actually, you (the women’s team) never step foot in any of them,” the 35-year-old former Chelsea, Liverpool and West Ham United midfielder says.
But when Longhurst was shown around Forest’s renovated Holme Road and Nigel Doughty Academy facilities by Davies (pictured top) and Wildgust last year, the tour hit different.
“When you see a Premier League club with a lot of history promoting something like that, you’re kind of like, ‘OK, I’m open to listening to it’,” she says. “But the facilities we use are exactly what they showed us when we came here.
“They also walked us into the first-team facilities, showed us what we might have access to on certain days but otherwise wouldn’t. That’s important. They’re not trying to sell you something that’s not there.”
Longhurst was one of several players with Championship or WSL experience who signed one-year deals at Forest last summer. She was joined by Mollie Green (former Liverpool and Everton), Melissa Johnson (Charlton), Freya Thomas (Coventry United), Charlie Wellings (Reading), Hollie Olding (Lewes), Millie Chandarana (Blackburn Rovers) and others.
There was a similar focus with the off-field hirings.
Wildgust transformed Villa Women from part-time to hybrid to full-time between 2017 and 2021. Her Forest appointment coincided with the hiring of Dave Long — former Forest boys academy coach and women’s football coach developer and talent reporter — as head of the girls’ academy.
Then there was Davies, who helped guide Villa to WSL promotion in 2019-2020 as first-team coach alongside head coach Gemma Davies. After more than 20 years as a player and coach with Villa, Davies left in 2022, joining West Bromwich Albion Women as assistant manager before taking on her first head-coach job with Forest in the summer of 2023.
Longhurst after beating Burnley in the third round of the FA Cup in January (Morgan Harlow/The FA/Getty Images)
“I’d interviewed for a couple of different head coaches role that summer, and there was something niggling away in my gut that this was the right fit,” Davies says. “I spoke with the directors, who explained what the vision was. I knew Amber from our time at Villa, which was unique. She understood me, I understand how she works. It aligned, and it’s certainly the best decision I ever made.”
Wildgust refers to their reunion in Nottingham as “this wonderful concoction of expertise and knowledge in what works to get into the WSL”. A more cynical vantage point regarding Forest’s methods, one taken by rival fans on social media, has been that they are buying the league — a similar charge was aimed at Newcastle United as they earned promotion to the Women’s Championship last season.
“When I think of ‘buying the league’, it’s buying really expensive players who are going to guarantee you promotion — that’s not exactly how we’re doing it at Forest, nor is it how, say, London City are doing it,” Wildgust says. “We’re making investments in the right places: in the structure around the players, because that leaves a legacy. It means there’s a facility for young girls to train at, to progress to being a professional football.”
Promotion from the National League used to be messy. There are two parallel divisions of 12 teams at that level but only one of the 24 teams went up each season, with the winners of the south and north sections facing each other in a winner-takes-all play-off. From last season, however, the FA doubled the number of relegation spots from the Championship, granting automatic promotion to the two title-winners in the third tier.
Consistency is cited as the determining factor for who gets those places. Wildgust views it as more of a process.
Step one: getting the structure right. Moving the women’s senior team and age groups out of rented facilities in Eastwood, north-west of the city, and into the more central Nigel Doughty Academy and onto renovated pitches at Holme Road previously used by Brian Clough’s Forest men’s team was paramount.
The City Ground’s recent redevelopment opened the door for the stadium to be home to both the men’s and women’s senior sides, which helps raise average attendances, while the better surface and greater pitch width help Forest Women play the possession-based football Davies espouses.
Step two: integration. When Wildgust was hired, she reported to Craig Mulholland, who was tasked with overseeing the academy and the women’s team, while Ross Wilson oversaw the men’s first team. “Before that, the women’s team was under-commercial,” Wildgust says. “So it was changing the mindset that the women’s team is not a commercial commodity. First and foremost, it’s about performance.”
Step three: staff, including full-time strength and conditioning coaches, physios, data analysts, communication officers and academy coaches exclusively for the women’s team.
Step four: full-time professionalisation. Headlines last summer announcing Forest Women’s plans to go full-time by 2025-26 focused on player salaries and contracts but Wildgust views the term more holistically.
“Last summer, we launched a women’s netball team,” she says. “We’re collaborating with them around what professionalisation looks like in a women’s sport capacity — so, research into women’s science, women’s health, avenues like sports bras, but also our pathway system. It all comes back to the question of: what does women’s professionalisation look like? How can we cope with that vision?
“We’re still early in that journey, but if we’d gone full-time overnight, it wouldn’t have worked. We wouldn’t have had the pitches, the changing rooms, the staff, the vision. You have to get the structure and strategy first, then the players.”
“Collaborative” is the word Davies returns to when discussing Forest.
Within the club, facilities are not referred to as belonging to the men’s first team and shared by the women’s side, but rather as belonging to the club. Terminology is, of course, one thing. “But it’s what it feels like,” Davies says.
The Nigel Doughty Academy, for example, is not large. “For a club as big as Forest, organising who is on what pitch at what time can be difficult,” Davies laughs. But the tight space has become a boon. According to Davies, from the start of this season, analysis, performance and coaching teams for the men’s, women’s and academy teams operate from the same room, use the same resources and share expertise.
An example Davies likes to offer forth was her team’s creation of the “Stat Pack”, a way of monitoring player performance based on data linked to the blueprint (the club refer to this as “Red Print” for obvious reasons, considering their kit colours) of that individual’s specific position when they were recruited. That creation has since been adapted by the academy’s various age grades and improved by data tools available through the men’s senior team.
“I hadn’t experienced that level of collaboration before,” Davies says. “But when you think about it, it’s common sense. Clubs say, ‘We want you to be a WSL team in five years’. And sometimes, unfortunately, what they say is support doesn’t always transpire to be that on the ground.”
Ultimately, any collaboration focuses on one goal: making Forest Women, in the short term, Championship-ready and eventually, WSL-ready.
“That’s our mantra,” says Davies, who signed a new two-and-a-half-year contract in November. “If you dropped us into the Championship, we have a style of play that can compete now, players who can play, facilities and staff that meet the needs. That’s what will set us apart for the rest of the season.”
Harkin leading Forest out to face Newcastle (Ed Sykes/The FA/Getty Images)
Forest were given a Championship litmus test in January, when they hosted last season’s National League North champions Newcastle in the Women’s FA Cup fourth round.
While the result — a 1-0 defeat — did not go Forest’s way, Davies considered the match the perfect close-up examination. Before the 2023-24 season, Newcastle became the National League North’s first full-time professional club, dipping into the transfer market and convincing players to drop down a level to assemble a Championship-ready squad.
“We’ve almost flipped roles in a way,” Davies says. “So when we drew them, we knew it was an opportunity to show we can compete with these teams. I was so proud of the performance. We went there with a limited squad. We had players out of position. But for the first 45 minutes, we were the better side.
“If you ask anybody that day, even speaking to some of the Newcastle staff afterwards, they knew we were the better team in the first half. That shows the direction we’re going.”
(Top photo: Carly Davies; Nottingham Forest FC)
