Friday night’s Scp vs Nottingham Forest friendly was less about the result than the countdown it framed. With a 7.45pm kick-off at the Estadio Algarve, Nottingham Forest closed out a 12-day training camp in Portugal knowing the real deadline is only a little more than three weeks away: the Premier League opener against Leeds United on August 22.
That makes the Sporting Lisbon match more than a pre-season checkpoint. It was the final game of the camp for Oliver Glasner’s side before they returned to the UK, and it arrived after a productive day in which Forest had already beaten Portimonense SAD 2-1 behind closed doors. The broader picture is simple enough: Forest have been unbeaten in pre-season, and that is exactly the sort of base a coach wants before the competitive schedule begins to tighten.
A useful test, not just a friendly
The value of a game like this is that it tells you where the team is in the build-up, not just whether the scoreline looked good. Forest are into the stage of pre-season where rhythm, fitness and timing matter just as much as the opposition, and playing Sporting Lisbon in Portugal gave Glasner another chance to measure his squad against a higher-level challenge after a camp built around work on the training ground.
That timing also matters because the season is arriving quickly. Glasner has little more than three weeks before the start of the 2026/27 term, and the friendly underlined how short that runway is. The summer transfer window does not close until 11pm on September 1, so the next few weeks will not only be about sharpening the team on the pitch but also about making sure the squad is ready for the start of the Premier League campaign.
Forest’s unbeaten pre-season does not guarantee anything, of course. Friendly form rarely does. But it does suggest the camp in Portugal has given the team a stable platform, and that is especially useful when the first competitive task is a home opener against Leeds United. At this point, the most important thing is not that Forest have looked perfect; it is that they have looked organised enough to keep building.
The Sporting Lisbon fixture, then, fits neatly into the story of where Forest are now: near the end of their Portugal work, close to the start of the league season and still in a phase where the main objective is readiness rather than headlines. The real judgment will come later. For now, the friendly simply confirms that the countdown has begun.
