The Championship Years

Lore & Background

The story of the Championship Years is inseparable from Brian Clough's arrival in 1973, when he and his assistant Peter Taylor walked into a club that had just been relegated to the Third Division. What followed was a four-year climb through the English football pyramid, culminating in promotion to the First Division in 1977. From that moment the team seemed to exist in a different league entirely—literally and figuratively—scoring freely, defending with a ferocity that bordered on theatre, and playing with a swagger that embarrassed bigger clubs.

The 1978–79 treble season remains the high-water mark. Forest won the league, the FA Cup (a 4–2 replay victory over Manchester United at Wembley), and the League Cup, all in the same campaign. The following spring, at the Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid, John Robertson's late strike against Marseille sealed the first European Cup. A year later, at Hampden Park in Glasgow, Forest did it again against Hamburg, making them the only English club besides Liverpool to lift the trophy twice. The sight of Clough, Taylor, and Barton celebrating in the dugout—three men who had built an empire from the Third Division—remains one of the most iconic images in the club's memory.

The era ended as abruptly as it had begun. Clough departed in 1981, the team's cohesion fractured, and within a few seasons Forest had slipped back into the lower reaches of the First Division. Yet the Championship Years never truly left. They are the benchmark, the standard against which every subsequent Forest season is measured, and the reason a city of roughly three hundred thousand people still talks about 1979 and 1980 with the same breathless reverence as a religious story.

In Their Own Story

The floodlights at the City Ground hummed with a particular frequency that night, the kind that made the grass look almost green-black under the sodium glare. It was a February evening, 1979, and the away end was a sea of red and white that stretched beyond the terracing, beyond the railings, beyond the city limits in a way that felt almost impossible for a club of this size. John Robertson, the captain, stood at the top of the box with his boots laced tight and his jaw set, watching the ball hang in the air like a question no one else was brave enough to answer. He swung his head, connected, and the net shuddered. The noise that followed was not a cheer so much as a physical force, a wall of sound that pressed against the chest and made the teeth ache. In the dugout, Brian Clough did not jump. He simply smiled, a small, private thing, as if he had known all along. Peter Taylor patted his back. Tony Barton lit a cigarette. And somewhere in the crowd, a man in a flat cap wept without shame, because for one night the whole city was a single, roaring, red-and-white heartbeat.

Reader's Guide

1977–78: The League Title. Brian Clough's side, promoted just a year earlier, stormed to the First Division championship with a goal difference that still feels absurd. John Robertson orchestrated from midfield while Viv Anderson and Trevor Francis (before his departure) punished defenders. The title announced that Forest were no longer a curiosity but a force of nature.

1978–79: The Treble. Forest added the FA Cup and League Cup to their league crown, both against Manchester United. The Wembley replay, a 4–2 rout, is still replayed in fan memory as the moment the club proved it could outclass the biggest names in English football. This season defined the template: fearless, high-scoring, and utterly unbothered by reputation.

1979: The First European Cup. At the Bernabéu, a late John Robertson goal silenced Marseille and a stadium full of Spanish neutrals. Forest became the first—and for a time the only—mid-sized English club to win the competition. The image of Clough in his cap and Taylor in his jacket, arms folded, became the defining photograph of the era.

1980: Back-to-Back. Hampden Park, Glasgow. Hamburg thought they had a chance. They did not. McGinlay and Robertson scored, and Forest became the only English club to win the European Cup in consecutive years. The achievement remains unmatched domestically and is the single greatest feat in the club's history.

1981: The Departure. Clough left, and the machinery that had made the impossible look routine ground to a halt. The Championship Years closed not with a whimper but with a quiet, final handshake, and the city was left holding a trophy cabinet full of ghosts and a memory that has never faded.

Each of these seasons layered a new ring onto the club's identity: ambition, dominance, continental glory, and the bittersweet knowledge that perfection is a season, not a state.

Did You Know?

• Nottingham Forest are one of only two English clubs to win the European Cup twice, alongside Liverpool, and the only one to do so in consecutive seasons (1979, 1980).
• The 1978–79 treble was completed against Manchester United in both cup finals, a detail that still animates Forest–United rivalries to this day.
• Brian Clough, Peter Taylor, and Tony Barton arrived at Forest in 1973 when the club was in the Third Division; by 1979 they had lifted the European Cup, a rise no other manager has matched in English football.
• The 1979 European Cup final at the Bernabéu was won 1–0, with the decisive goal coming in the final minutes—a fact that keeps the match alive in retelling for nearly half a century.