Sacked by email two minutes before midnight: the manager who kept Nottingham Forest up says they got it wrong

Vitor Pereira kept Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, planned their pre-season and even drew up a list of possible signings. Then, at 11.58pm on 30 June, an email arrived telling him he was no longer needed.

The Portuguese coach has now spoken about the way his time at the City Ground ended, and while he accepts the decision itself, he is clear that the manner of it “was not correct”.

Speaking to The Athletic, Vitor Pereira explained that the first he knew of it was that late-night message, sent with two minutes to spare before a clause in his contract ran out.

Why did Nottingham Forest sack Vitor Pereira by email?

Pereira’s contract included a clause that let either side end the deal before the end of June. Nottingham Forest used it right at the death.

The timing wasn’t random. It came just after the club learned that Oliver Glasner, fresh from leaving Selhurst Park after winning the Conference League and the 2025 FA Cup with Crystal Palace, was interested in the job. Glasner is the man in the dugout now.

By then Pereira had already reviewed the positives and negatives of the previous season, arranged the pre-season friendlies and identified potential signings. The players were due back within weeks. They returned to a different manager.

“A complete surprise”

Pereira said: “It was a complete surprise. I never heard anything that made me feel or think the club no longer counted on me. In the end, they had the right to decide what they wanted for the club, and I accept that.”

His issue is with how Evangelos Marinakis’ regime went about it. He added: “The only thing that was not correct was the way they did it, that was the only unfair part. Sending an email… two minutes before midnight, when we had already organised everything for pre-season.”

He also made it clear that a straight conversation would have been enough: “If they had said to me, ‘Vitor, although you have organised everything, we have another possibility…’, that would have been fine. That is football.”

Has the change worked for Forest so far?

Not yet. Pereira arrived in February with Forest three points above the drop zone and left them 16th, five points clear of relegated West Ham United and above Tottenham Hotspur.

Under Glasner, Forest are second from bottom with one win from nine league games. They are winless in five, and they are already out of the EFL Cup. The latest setback was a 2-0 defeat at Brentford on Saturday, when Nikola Milenković turned in an own goal and then deflected Igor Thiago’s late shot in for the second.

There is talk of reinforcements, too, with Forest ready to rival Man United for Jean-Philippe Mateta, but that is a problem for January. Right now the table makes grim reading.

‘I am not a firefighter’

This was the second time Pereira had come into a Premier League club midway through a season and kept it up. He did the same at Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2024-25, stayed on, and was sacked the following November with Wolves bottom of the table. They went down.

He doesn’t want a third rescue job. “I am not a firefighter,” he said. “I want to prove my worth by facing and competing with the best managers in the league, and do something special. When you take over a team in the middle of the season, it is because something is not working.”

Pereira says he has turned down offers recently that he might have taken at another stage of his career, and his aim is to compete for the Premier League title: “If you look at my career before I came to England, you will see that I almost always worked to win titles.”

The last time he managed a club expected to win things was Flamengo in 2023. It didn’t go well: he fell short in the Campeonato Carioca, the Recopa Sudamericana, the Supercopa do Brasil and the Club World Cup, and was gone within three months.

Verdict: Pereira has a point, but the title talk is a stretch

On the email, it’s hard to argue with him. He did the job he was hired for, he had pre-season mapped out, and a phone call would have cost Forest nothing. Instead it took a contract clause and a timestamp of 11.58pm.

Forest’s decision looks shakier by the week, too. Swapping the manager who kept you up for one who has a single league win in nine is not how the upgrade was supposed to look.

The title ambition is another matter. Two survival jobs in England, a sacking at Wolves and a short, trophyless spell at Flamengo is not the CV that big clubs usually call. If Pereira wants to avoid another relegation scrap, he may have to be patient, because the clubs who need him most right now are exactly the ones he says he won’t join, starting with bottom-of-the-table sides like Sunderland, whose own head coach is under pressure.