Roy Keane once joked about taking players paintballing to boost flagging team spirit when he was Sunderland manager.
"Paintballing! Brilliant, but you always know when teams are having a hard time when they’re paintballing," he said to Micah Richards last year as the chalk and cheese duo filmed for Sky Sports' Euro 2020 preview show. "You know you’re heading for relegation when you’re paintballing."
Nottingham Forest head coach Steve Cooper will hope his team are not worried about relegation as they make embark on their first Premier League season since the 1990s - a decade from Keane played for the club with distinction - as Cooper prepares for a different approach to the Reds great, when it comes to team spirit.
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Keane himself is an example of the fact that teams can have top players and still go down, with present day Forest fully aware of the scale of the task at hand. They have signed 12 new players and are well on course to smash the £100m barrier for spending if they finally land Morgan Gibbs-White from Wolves.
The team which won promotion has been stripped back to its partly local core. Joe Worrall and Ryan Yates have been named captain and vice-captain respectively with Brennan Johnson signing a new contract.
Only three other players who started the play-off final remain - Steve Cook, Scott McKenna and Jack Colback - with five loan signings leaving alongside Brice Samba, Lewis Grabban, Tobias Figueiredo and Gaetan Bong, who is understood to have been a fine club man even though he was often derided by fans.
Yates this week told BBC Sport's Darren Fletcher he feels Forest have retained players 'who would die for each other'. So how do Forest retain the spirit which saw them score twice in injury time to beat Bristol City, or hold on when their backs were pinned to the wall by Sheffield United in the second half of the the play-off semi-final second leg?
For Cooper it is not about paintballing or sessions down the pub, it is about setting standards every day having done extensive research on the character of each new signing with new arrivals coming in from the French, German and even Costa Rican leagues, as well within this country.
"I personally think creating a spirit, togetherness, culture, whatever you want to call it is not about going on a team bonding event whether it be a meal, or building a raft or climbing a mountain," he said ahead of the first game of the season at Newcastle United tomorrow.
"For me it’s an everyday behaviour it’s about sticking to your belief and your values every day that’s how you create a real togetherness and spirit and support network to each other. It’s about living and breathing it every single day and that’s what we’ve tried to do every day since we’ve been here and we will continue until it finishes.
"I'm quite cautious with being too confident (in how the squad has gelled) because we will see. But we have done a lot of due diligence on not just the type of player but the type of person. The football data to identify the player can be the more straight forward easier bit but the more difficult and in some ways more important part is the attitude, the character, the teammate that they are, the leadership they may have, their ambition.
"That’s the stuff that’s not easy to find out but we’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn as much about that as we can. Myself and other people have meetings with the players to try and feel it, so we’re confident that the players we’ve brought in are the right type of characters and professionals.
"And when you are those things, along with other stuff, that’s normally how you build a team because a team is not just about the tactical and technical ideas it’s about the spirit, the culture and the togetherness."
Cooper recognises Forest are not going to win as many games as they did last season, but he does not give the air of a manager fearing the worst. He is well aware there is a gulf between the Premier League and Championship, but the culture he instilled in the second tier will be cultivated again at the top level, he hopes.
"If you have a philosophy and a culture and togetherness I don’t think that matters what league you’re playing in, whether it’s a training day or a match day whether it’s an individual attitude it should be something that belongs to the football club so it shouldn’t matter what league you’re playing in," he said.
So much has changed in a short space of time at the City Ground, literally as extensive work has been done this summer to make the stadium Premier League ready. Chairman Nicholas Randall QC told the BBC 'we feel at times we're trying to catch up 23 years in seven or eight weeks'.
The plan remains the same in many ways though. Recruitment this summer has seen players come in to fit an age and tactical profile with Jesse Lingard the one who has broken the mould financially if not tactically.
The Nigel Doughty Academy remains a top priority too. Young striker Dale Taylor has signed a new contract and Aaron Donnelly and Oli Hammond were heavily involved in pre-season. They are the future. In the here and now it is about staying in the league for the long-term.
"I guess what I’m saying by that is that I want us to be us in the best league in the world and stick to our plan and that’s our aim," Cooper said. "It’s a completely different context and challenge in so many ways but we still want to be ourselves and that’s what we’re aiming to do."
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