For a fortnight in early season, it was an open secret inside Nottingham Foresters' training ground: manager Lucas Verhoeven was reviewing Milán Kovács's role in the side, with a view to easing the twenty-seven-year-old midfielder out of his starting XI and, potentially, off the wage bill entirely come the transfer window. Then, without explanation, the conversation simply stopped.
Kovács has been a Nottingham Foresters player for three seasons, brought in by his agent Otto Reinholt as one of several ageing internationals Reinholt has placed in the Elite Division in what one rival agent called "a very profitable retirement tour." His form this season has been, by most measures, ordinary — a squad player's output on a first-team wage. Verhoeven, an unusually cerebral, methodical manager by the club's own description, is understood to have built a genuine tactical case for moving on from him.
Reinholt does not give interviews and did not respond to a request for comment. But people close to Nottingham Foresters describe a relationship between him and owner Reginald Openshaw that predates Kovács's arrival by years — one favour among what is understood to be several, never itemised publicly, never denied privately either. Whatever was said, it was said quietly, and it worked: the review of Kovács's role is, as of this week, no longer something anyone at the club is willing to discuss on the record.
None of this shows up anywhere in the club's public statements, its financial reporting, or its enforcement record — this isn't the kind of thing FFP catches. It's a manager's football judgement being overridden by ownership, for reasons ownership won't explain, in favour of an outcome that happens to suit one very well-connected agent's client list.
Nottingham Foresters are the oldest club in the professional game, founded in 1857, a fact the club is proud enough of to have built an entire section of its own history around. Whether that history means anything when it's set against a phone call nobody will confirm was ever made is, this week, an open question inside a club that likes to think of itself as above exactly this kind of thing.