Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis insists signing 23 players in the summer transfer window was "unavoidable".
Forest overhauled their squad after promotion to the Premier League, with a host of new faces coming through the door at the City Ground. While the likes of Josh Bowler, Hwang Ui-jo and Brandon Aguilera immediately went out on loan, head coach Steve Cooper still had a whole host of new options ready to play.
The Reds of course lost five key loanees from last season, none of whom the club were able to convince to return either on loan or permanently. Djed Spence and James Garner earned moves to Tottenham and Everton respectively. Keinan Davis (Watford) and Max Lowe (Sheff Utd) are back in the Championship, while Philip Zinckernagel is at Standard Liege, on loan from Olympiacos.
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Tobias Figueiredo, Lewis Grabban and Carl Jenkinson all left on free transfers. Brice Samba, Nicholas Ioannou, Xande Silva, Nuno da Costa and Joe Lolley also moved on. That immediately gave Forest 13 players to replace, while also needing to add Premier League quality to their squad.
"They said we have too many players and that it would be difficult," Marinakis told the Telegraph. "But five of our key players last season were on loan, so we had to replace them.
"You also need to buy players at Premier League level so we had to add quality in all areas. If our key players were not on loan, it would have been a different story altogether. It was unavoidable.
"I didn’t just buy players to spend money, it was because we needed them."
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