Here is the NFFC news

I mean, fair enough. He's not going to buy it without planning permission.

Maybe he will get it after the Rachel Reeves announcement today.

Agreed - and after both sides saying they would conduct negotiations in private a couple of months ago, the Council leader gives every appearance of having gone public too early again (for a bit of popularity / positive publicity?). I’m not surprised that the owner isn’t impressed

Unfair, I think. Important to remember it was Forest, and Tom Cartledge, who chose to go public on this a few months ago with invited BBC and Athletic interviews and a bizarre 15-minute video issued through club channels - I presume he made the miscalculation that the council would be easy meat with commissioners in place. Media wanted the-then council leader on the record but the council had no desire to debate this in the public domain.

They were finally smoked out when Cartledge did another round of interviews in which he was being pretty disingenuous, especially by (seemingly) deliberately not mentioning that the freehold option had been on the table from the very start of the negotiations. He appeared to be making it all about the lease in order to lay the groundwork for a move. Forest have been paying a ridiculously low rent for a very long time and were clearly not prepared to pay market rate.

The second important consideration is that the council is not a private company. Quite correctly, key decisions taken by any local authority are made in the public arena to allow debate and challenge, a vote and, hopefully, full transparency. The City Ground deal goes to the council's Executive Board for final approval next Tuesday and, crucially, agenda papers with more detail were published at 6pm last night (a legal requirement for them to be made available to press and public at least a week in advance). The council leader talking about it at 2.30pm in the chamber yesterday is hardly 'going early' unless you feel three hours is a liberty. Forest were fully aware of this constitutional process and what was going to happen, in what order.

Over to Forest now.

Oh I am sure there have been games on both sides. None the less, on this occasion (imminent agenda papers or not) it was the Council leader who came out & gave interviews essentially saying that it was all done (albeit with caveats about formal ratification), forcing (?) the club to clarify that the terms are still being worked on.

“I ask Khan if this represents a personal win for her, 2 months after taking her current position. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said; ‘an early win. People were saying “Can Labour take tough decisions?” You will see in the next couple of weeks that there are a lot of difficult decisions coming our way.’” [Nick Miller’s piece in The Athletic this morning].

That answer to Miller strongly supports my impression yesterday, and I stand by it. She would have been better (in my view) to publish the papers and, when asked, to have said something like “we are working closely with the club and believe we have made excellent progress; we hope to have definite good news in the coming days”. But she couldn’t resist it.

Politicians gonna politic.

Absolutely. But Forest called all this on and the council stayed silent for a number of weeks. Cartledge can't have it both ways.

I, therefore, find it amusing that the past couple of Forest statements have reiterated the need for 'confidential negotiations'. I get the impression this hasn't played out the way they thought it would when they pushed the publicity button. They perhaps misjudged the mood of fans and believed a desired move away could be actioned and then blamed on the council lease.

I still think their long-term aim is to leave the City Ground - interesting that Khan mentioned a few times yesterday about legal protections for the council in case Forest sought to sell on the land. I suspect that will be the final hurdle to overcome - everything else will be agreed in principle.

Everything at Forest is controlled by the owners (or as the ticket office wrote to me, "the board, which is essentially two people"). These statements will have been cleared (possibly demanded) by the owners.
Not forgetting, Moronakis is a councilman in Piraeus and, as a multi-millionaire with a very forceful personality, very used to getting his own way.
Does the council own any bakeries?

Well that depends on the price. If the use of the land is restricted, then the value is reduced. So if the council is accepting a discounted price (relative to the price of the land as a development site) then they should absolutely be restricting its use. If they are seeking to maximise the value realised, they don’t get to do that.

In any tender process, the club will likely be the highest bidder. It’s not worth massively more as a development site, especially as a developer first gets stuck with the cost of removing a football stadium. If the clubs wants to stay, nobody is going to pay more. If they want to leave, I’d be surprised if the better option wasn’t to simply walk away.. buying the freehold so they can flip it to a developer would probably generate a lot of angst for not a lot of money.

Forest Women are going full time pro, and will henceforth play every match at the WFCG.

I'm sure JA has a reason why this is some nefarious move by the owner that's actually bad, but it seems pretty good to me.

Possibly. It’s a negotiation that’s not really about price. There is one very obvious buyer who appears to want it, and who should value it at more than anyone else.. regardless of purpose. So in a rational world, council sells for 50p more than the development value, and nobody gives a fuck if it’s restricted.

But it is still the case that to any other buyer it is worth much less with restricted use. Indeed, it’s probably not worth anything at all.

So one party may be volatile and if the council says ‘well we want you to pay what that dude over there would pay, but we’re not going to sell you the same thing he’s willing to pay for’ it may say ‘fuck that’ and act against it’s logical financial interest.

So maybe it makes as much sense for the council to reason that it’s highly unlikely the club is trying to underpay to make a quick buck on a flip, and the best interests of the good people of Nottingham are served by accepting a reasonable, if not entirely tested, price and not risk getting into a hissy fit over it.

All that said, I’ll be surprised if restricted use hasn’t been a feature of the negotiation right the way through, and the price isn’t a compromise that everyone has already agreed they can live with.

The club won’t only want to use the land in its current form, no - nor should they. Even 20 years ago when Nigel D was talking about developing the CG, a chunk of the financial viability came from commercial development around the ground (in those days IIRC there was talk of flats on the land between the Taylor stand and Trent Bridge) plus enhanced commercial use of the ground itself (corporate non-match-day malarkey, concerts etc). The imperative to do that sort of thing has only become more urgent in the intervening years, and will become even more so with the new PSR rules.

In any case, the cost of purchase (assuming the widely quoted c.£10m freehold price is accurate) is equivalent to 13 years of the new rental cost that Khan herself mentions in Miller’s piece; renting is thus only “much less than purchase” if there are cash flow issues, and I very much doubt there are in Marinkisland. As others have said - again, including Khan - there will undoubtedly be significant covenants on the use of the land; even if they wanted to, Forest wouldn’t be able to sell on (e.g. to developers) in order to finance Toton or similar.

Those covenants, or similar, will have been there all along; they are completely standard in such deals (we were able to prevent the local Council from building houses - or anything at all - on a park about 250 yards from our house because we found a covenant in the title that restricted the use to “sport or public health” - Salisbury City played there in the 1930s & the covenant was placed there when they moved to a different park).

For those and other reasons I have never believed that Plan A was (let alone still is) Toton - but they were completely right to explore the other options, because if you don’t have a known walk-away position in these complex politico-commercial deals, then the other side have you over a barrel. It would make no commercial sense whatsoever to buy the CG covenanted freehold and spend huge sums on developing it as a sporting location (which will be the only available option) only then to sell it on and move / build a completely new ground (at colossal expense). Whatever else you might accuse Marinakis of being, commercially inept would not come high on the list. Assuming this deal makes it over the line (which I think it will), Forest aren’t moving.

I thought we had planning permission. There seemed to be a big saga about it ending in it being granted, wasn't it?

The site will only be a sporting site for as long as the club wants it to be one. It has no value to the public without the football club, unless the council fancies taking possession and fronting the exorbitant cost of turning it into an actual public space. Which it will not do. It’s Forest, or it’s flats.

The council can’t force Forest to stay there, so the land being publicly owned is irrelevant. The council is just a landlord. The public utility of the site in terms of it being home to a club of great value to the community is best served by trying to ensure it stays that way which, it seems likely, means selling the freehold. Absolutely they should try and do so in a way that maximises the likelihood of the club staying there.. but that does mean doing a deal that the club is happy with.

It all seems rather academic though. They have obviously come to something close to agreement on both price and what development will be permitted.

Yes it is correct that the club appears to want to change the use of some of the site. I didn’t mean to ignore that. One assumes that both NCC and Rushcliffe councils are broadly ok with what the club proposes, and that may have factored into the price. The principal use of the site will not change though.

FWIW I don’t think it’s a good idea to allow flats to be built on the site and I’m surprised that the club thinks it is financially worthwhile. Billionaire me would want as much open space around the stadium as possible.. partly on account of being spoiled for that sort of thing where he now lives, and seeing the huge benefits of it. However, it feels like the ship sailed on that a long time ago, as that was always a part of the development plan.. long before the kerruffle began.