Forest to pay 'lucrative' wages in move towards professionalism

Nottingham Forest women will play all their home games at the City Ground from next season

Nottingham Forest will put its women’s players on “lucrative” wages as it moves towards full-time professionalism, says the club official overseeing the side’s transformation.

The third-tier outfit, which was run independently of the Premier League club until 2019, have announced that owner Evangelos Marinakis will increase funding to "accelerate the growth of the women's game" at the Reds.

Forest’s move, which will start with 18 full-time players next season before going fully professional for the 2025-26 campaign, comes just days after second division club Blackburn Rovers were reportedly only offering to pay its players minimum wage.

England midfielder Georgia Stanway was among those to criticise Blackburn, whose playing budget for what is a semi-professional side is said to be £100,000 for next season.

When asked about how the Reds’ salaries might compare to Blackburn’s, Forest head of women and girls football Amber Wildgust said: “The way we see things at Nottingham Forest is that we don’t pay minimum wage anyway.

“That is the same across all departments, so it will be lucrative for our female players, absolutely.”

With Reading, another club that played a division higher than Forest last season, hit by financial issues and forced to pull out of the Championship, Wildgust was asked if she felt the Reds were “bucking the trend” this summer with their decision to invest more in the women’s game.

“It’s really sad to hear the news of what is happening to other clubs, especially those that are more established,” she told BBC Radio Nottingham.

“Obviously that is not the case here for Nottingham Forest, we have a really supportive owner, we have backing from the resources we have internally and the club just wants to drive women’s sport forward.

“That is what we are here to do and that is why we want to make the women’s team full-time, so I do think we are bucking the trend but we shouldn’t be bucking the trend, it should just be the trend across women’s sport in general.”

Forest finished third in the National League Northern Premier Division table last season, having come within one win of promotion 12 months earlier, and Wildgust says the move toward professionalism has only raised confidence that the Reds can end their 13-year stay in the third tier and take a major step towards the top-flight.

“We want to achieve all our ambitions and we want to achieve our vision of being in the Women’s Super League,” she told BBC East Midlands Today.

“This is the first step to making that a reality.”