Elliot Anderson: Nottingham Forest's Rising Star with Nine-Figure Value
At Nottingham Forest, the price of ambition is climbing by the week.
Elliot Anderson, still shaping the early chapters of his career, is already being talked about in the sort of numbers that make even Manchester City and Manchester United pause. Interest from the Etihad and Old Trafford is real enough, but prising him out of the City Ground will demand more than a polite enquiry and a glossy presentation deck.
Evangelos Marinakis does not sell cheap. He rarely sells at all unless the deal lands heavily in Forest’s favour. Those around Trentside know the script by now: if a star goes, the collective pot swells. Only then does the owner entertain the idea of cashing in.
In Anderson’s case, that pot could be overflowing.
A nine-figure midfielder in the making
Talk around the game has already attached a nine-figure fee to Anderson’s name. Anyone thinking of testing Forest’s resolve is being pointed firmly towards the £100 million-plus bracket. That is the going rate, they are told, for a midfielder expected to light up this summer’s World Cup as part of Thomas Tuchel’s England plans.
The tournament in North America could send his value into orbit. Perform there, and the conversation changes from “how much?” to “is he even for sale?”
Jack Colback, who knows the City Ground and its demands as well as anyone, has seen enough to understand the hype. Speaking in association with Bally Bet, he stripped the analysis back to its simplest form.
“He’s just very, very good,” Colback said. No caveats. No gentle build-up.
He sees something of a throwback in Anderson, a midfielder who refuses to be boxed into modern labels. “He’s a very old-fashioned kind of midfielder, where he does everything,” Colback explained. While the game now obsesses over No.6s, No.8s and No.10s, Anderson simply plays. And plays everywhere.
His defensive work holds up under pressure. On the ball, he dictates rhythm, sets the tempo, drags his team up the pitch. He creates. He arrives in the box. He does the ugly stuff and the pretty stuff, and he does it with a composure that belies his age.
“He’s one of those that does it all,” Colback added. “He could be one of the very best.” That is not a phrase thrown around lightly by players who have lived the grind.
Forest’s new core
Crucially for Forest, Anderson is not a lone bright spark. He is part of a spine that has quietly taken shape under a recruitment operation that, for all the noise around the club, has hit far more than it has missed.
Morgan Gibbs-White has grown into the talismanic No.10 in that iconic Garibaldi shirt, a creative force and emotional barometer rolled into one. Around him, Forest have built a side that can survive, and occasionally thrive, in a league that punishes hesitation.
Behind them, Murillo has emerged as the modern centre-half every ambitious club wants: Brazilian, brave on the ball, and unafraid to defend on the front foot.
Colback was still at Forest when Murillo first walked through the doors. The first impression was striking. Live, in the stadium, the 23-year-old can sometimes look like he has a mistake in him, that split second where risk and reward wrestle. Yet he reads the game so sharply and reacts so quickly that danger often evaporates before it fully forms.
Forest have felt his absence this season. Injuries have taken him out of the side at times, and the team’s form has dipped with him in the stands. That correlation has not gone unnoticed.
For Colback, it all feeds into a broader picture. “I think it's credit to the club, the recruitment has been really, really good for a good few years now – credit to the owner for that,” he said. The days of Forest drifting feel a long way off.
Murillo’s new contract, tying him to the City Ground until 2030, underlines that point. If he sees it out, he and Gibbs-White have the platform to carve out something lasting, something that lives alongside the great modern names in Forest folklore rather than beneath them.
Legends in the stands, legends in the making
Those legends are never far away. Some of them have been back in familiar territory recently, walking the same corridors and stepping out on the same pitch where new heroes are trying to make their mark.
Colback, a key figure in the 2022 promotion campaign, has returned as part of a different kind of project. Nottingham Forest’s front-of-shirt partner Bally Bet has been on a mission to shine a light on the players who keep the game alive away from the television cameras: the long-serving grassroots stalwarts who turn up in all weather, year after year.
Forest great Mark Crossley took on the task of assembling the first ever All-Stars Vets squad, a team built not on transfer fees or social media followings, but on character. Real characters. The kind you only find on muddy pitches and in cramped changing rooms, where stories are swapped and bruises are worn like medals.
Crossley did not work alone. Other recognisable Forest faces joined him as he pieced together the Bally Bet All-Stars, a squad designed as a celebration of everything that makes grassroots football matter.
For one day, those veterans swapped recreation grounds for the City Ground. They walked out into a Premier League arena, given the full top-flight treatment, and faced a hand-picked team of Forest legends on May 28.
While they played, they did so under the gaze of a club trying to bridge eras: past heroes on the pitch, present stars in the headlines, future transfer sagas already brewing.
Somewhere between the noise around nine-figure bids and the roar for one more tackle in a vets game lies the true measure of Forest right now – a club stubborn enough to hold its ground, ambitious enough to dream bigger, and shrewd enough to know exactly what its best players are worth.
