Nottingham Forest handed staggering fine after extraordinary tweet following Everton loss
Nottingham Forest have been fined £750,000 for their extraordinary outburst on club social media that followed the defeat to Everton. Seven minutes after the final whistle of the game, one that was key to both team’s chances of Premier League survival, Forest’s official account on X, formerly Twitter, slammed a series of controversial calls against the club.
It also drew reference to the fact the Video Assistant Referee had been Stuart Attwell, a supporter of Luton Town, another club in the relegation battle.
The post stunned the world of football and quickly became the subject of disciplinary procedures. The outcome has now been published by the Football Association, along with details of the investigation that followed the April game.
READ MORE: Everton reality now clear after Man City case and £450m concern over Premier League rule changes
READ MORE: Everton set for clarity over final Goodison Merseyside derby and Christmas fixture schedule
Forest lost the match 2-0 due to goals from Idrissa Gueye and Dwight McNeil. The three points provided a significant boost to Everton’s survival ambitions and formed the platform for home wins over Liverpool and Brentford in the days that followed.
The away side felt hard done to, however, believing they had a case for three penalties in the match. Forest were awarded none and none were checked by VAR - hence the frustration with Attwell, whose backing of Luton had been raised by former referee Mark Clattenburg, then an advisor to the Midlands club, before the match, though no request for him to be withdrawn from the fixture was made.
Each incident involved Blues defender Ashley Young, who the following day posted a reference to Justin Timberlake’s hit song ‘Cry Me a River’ on social media as he mocked the reaction of Forest. The refereeing body, the PGMOL, later conceded that one of the incidents should have led to a penalty.
Forest’s reaction included the post on X at 3.37pm, which read: “3 extremely poor decisions - 3 penalties not given - which we simply cannot accept. We warned the PGMOL that the VAR is a Luton fan before the game, but they didn’t change him. Our patience has been tested multiple times. NFFC will now consider its options.”
Forest continued to post in the following days with further social media messages calling for the audio recordings of the officials as they discussed each incident to be made public and then to call for the refereeing body to “amend its rule on allegiances to account for contextual rivalries in the league table, not just local rivalries.”
In the proceedings that followed, Forest denied that, when taken in context with the follow-up comments, that the first post implied bias or questioned the integrity of an official and claimed the club “was seeking to do no more than to start a debate about the potential difficulty of having as VAR someone whose position might, because of his support for a team which could be affected by the result of the match in question be compromised, and that the potential for unconscious or perceived/apparent bias was an issue that needed to be addressed in the wider interests of the game.”
The FA disagreed and the regulatory commission that presided over the case ruled in its favour, finding the first post “inevitably involved an implication of actual bias on his [Attwell’s] part against NFFC, and we so find on a balance of probabilities. It follows, in our judgement, that as the integrity of a match official has been called into question in this way, this was improper conduct, and thus, we find the charge proved.”