Villainous Evangelos Marinakis has exuded main character energy in spades in 2025 | OneFootball

The sight of Evangelos Marinakis sat seething in his customary City Ground seat as the ungrateful worms that are his Nottingham Forest team had the temerity to lose to possibly the best team in the country was to be reminded of just how thoroughly he has inserted himself into Barclays lore over 2025.

He didn’t come from nowhere. We’ve all been dimly aware of the outlandish cartoon villain in charge of Forest and his entertaining ways, but 2025 was his year in so many ways. This was the year when his main-character energy achieved mainstream crossover.

It’s been a spectacularly prickish year for the big man, and who knows what 2026 may bring. We do really quite seriously want to see him march on to the pitch, ageing iPhone in hand, to furiously remonstrate with Sean Dyche as he did so infamously with Nuno Espirito Santo towards the end of last season.

We’re absolutely certain Dyche wouldn’t just stand there and take that utter woke nonsense like beta cuck Nuno.

That wild incident was key to the whole Marinakis character arc of 2025, though. Because what he was beyond furious about was that Nottingham Forest – Nottingham Forest! – had only managed to draw with Leicester and this had dented their Champions League – Champions League! – chances.

The breathtaking speed with which entitlement took hold of Marinakis and Forest on the back of being Quite Good for Quite A While in an all-time-weak Premier League season was stunning to behold.

Running out of steam on the home straight and not quite making it into the Champions League was, for Marinakis and others, an absolutely unacceptable end to a season that began, as all seasons for all but a handful of teams must, with avoiding relegation trouble as the primary goal.

That Marinakis was so furious with the man more responsible than any other – himself included – for Forest being in a position where he was able to get quite so dangerously high on his own farts was just profoundly ungrateful and enormously Marinakis.

The public nature of that specific outburst cemented his status. He was a main character now. And boy has he spent the rest of the year doubling down on that with some elite villainy.

With Daniel Levy gone, Marinakis is now the Premier League club suit most likely to be pictured sat watching from the stands and requiring commentators, by ancient law, to say “penny for his thoughts”.

And the great thing with Marinakis is that you don’t really need to spend that penny. Unlike the expressionless round head of Levy, Marinakis’ thoughts on any situation at any time are writ large across his features. Especially when he’s happy, but especially when he’s angry.

Happy moments of Marinakis behaviour this season have included the entirely normal photo op he staged with Morgan Gibbs-White after convincing the number 10 to sign a new contract entirely and definitely of his own free will. That incident also reminds us that even acts of villainy can have unexpected outcomes; saving Gibbs-White from joining Spurs was far more of a kindness than any of us could have predicted at the time, even allowing for the undeniable and unending fact that Spurs are Spurs.

There was also the undisguised glee he had over Forest’s promotion to the Europa League at Crystal Palace’s expense. We sort of admire the complete lack of pretence there. There was at least an honesty to it rather than some performative attempt at ‘Not the way we wanted to qualify but…’ response.

He was egging UEFA on, and fair play.

This season, Marinakis’ core work in maintaining his profile and expanding his role has been to fall back on an old favourite. Manager sackings. Shrewd work. After the wild behaviour of the summer, there was no need to overcomplicate things. Why not simply fall back on a tried-and-trusted tactic?

Nuno was doomed from the moment of that on-pitch dressing-down, really. The surprise if anything was that a flimsy and unconvincing entente cordiale lasted until a fair way into the new season. But not far enough for Nuno, the man who had just delivered Forest’s best league finish in 30 years, to claim victory in the Premier League Sack Race.

But Marinakis was only warming up, following that dramatic flourish with his greatest act of hubris yet. So quickly and utterly had Marinakis lost sight of where Forest had been just a year earlier and how quickly they could return to that status, that he appointed Ange Postecoglou.

It was an absurd and wildly hubristic decision. An appointment that literally everyone told him would be a disaster, but he did it anyway. Handed over the reins to the man who had just led Tottenham to 17th place and had entirely forgotten how to win any game of football that wasn’t in the Europa League.

Full credit to Postecoglou; he leant so hard into the role that he managed to somehow be even worse an idea for Forest than even the most dire of predictions. Which were very dire indeed.

He even forgot how to win Europa League games, and managed to condense the entire two-year story of his Spurs reign into six weeks at Forest.

In truth, he pretty much packed the whole thing into one Carabao game at Swansea in which Forest spent the first half roaring into a 2-0 lead on the back of some of the most aggressively beautiful attacking football you could ever wish to see and the second half collapsing to an absurd 3-2 defeat in which the very existence of the concept of defending was challenged.

Which we assume is all part of the plan to make it all the more spectacular when he inevitably faces the big man’s wrath.