“You can imagine it: he’s a centre-back, I’m a striker,” says Liam Delap, Nottingham Forest’s £45m club-record signing, smiling as he sets the scene. He is reliving taking on his younger brother, Finn, in the garden. These days, they are each other’s biggest supporters – Liam attended Finn’s victory for third-tier Burton on Wednesday – but as kids there was a friendly rivalry. “There were probably a lot of tears, a lot of fights … whether it was playing Monopoly or football, it always ended in either the table being flipped or kicking the shit out of each other.”
It is a competitive streak that has stuck and Delap is determined to make his presence felt at Forest, for whom he could make his full debut against Tottenham on Saturday. It has been a testing 16 months; he left Chelsea a season into a six-year contract and after one goal in 28 top-flight appearances, a dozen of those starts. “It is never a linear path straight to the top,” Delap says, his right hand taking flight in the City Ground boardroom, the 1979 and 1980 European Cups shimmering behind him. “I just want to get my head down, focus and keep improving because I’m still so young and I have so much to learn. I even at times probably think I’ve been in football a lot longer than I have. I’ve still, hopefully, got a long career ahead.
“I think you just have to accept that sometimes things go bad, things happen … it might [prove to] be a good thing, I think. My first loans to Stoke and Preston [across 2022-23] didn’t really go well at all and it was probably one of the best things that happened because I learnt so much from that season and went to Hull [for 2023-24] and kicked on from there. I’m still young, I’ve still got a lot of learning to do. Sometimes injuries happen, sometimes you don’t play. I don’t think anything is lost … Everyone has rocky moments. I’ve just got to use them to learn and kick on.”
Last summer, Delap was hot property. Oliver Glasner tells a story of Delap having proposals from 18 Premier League clubs and jests that the 23-year-old knows every top-flight manager owing to the various Zoom calls he held while deciding his next move. After all, one of those was with Glasner, then at Crystal Palace. Forest wanted him then, too. “It was a tough decision,” recalls Delap. “I remember the conversation we had, I was really impressed and I thought: ‘This guy [Glasner] is really good.’ He spoke incredibly well and you can see he has done really well with the strikers he has had in the past. That definitely stuck in my mind.”
Glasner wants Delap to play to his strengths: physicality, power and finishing. He doesn’t mean the forward’s hidden talent: cube roots. At the start of the year a clip of Delap showing off his maths skills went viral. “I didn’t enjoy maths one bit but I was always quite good at it. One of my friends taught me in school how to do it and I didn’t forget it. I hated school, [the] work, but I was always quite intelligent.”
The Austrian head coach said it was apparent in conversations with Delap this summer that the player had learnt lessons from a trying year: “I think it shows his attitude and his character that he said: ‘Yeah, I want a team and a club that values my strengths and wants to play to my strengths.’ Because I never want to change a player: it doesn’t make sense to say: ‘OK, now you should play like Messi: false nine, drop into midfield and combine play with one or two touches.”
A tally of 12 goals in the Ipswich side relegated in 2024-25 triggered widespread interest. At that point, Delap was talked up as a potential heir to Harry Kane as England’s No 9. He has been capped by his country at every age group and was in the same under-16s team as Jude Bellingham. “As a little kid, all you want to do is play for your country. So, of course, in my mind that’s where I want to get to. But it’s not as easy as that. I have to work hard and improve and that’s all I can do.”
An imposing 6ft 2in striker, Delap has long been viewed as the next big thing. He spearheaded Manchester City to FA Youth Cup victory over Chelsea in 2020, a couple of months after Pep Guardiola handed him his senior City debut aged 17. Cole Palmer and Morgan Rogers, now teammates at Chelsea, were part of that same under-18s side, together with the new Aston Villa defender Taylor Harwood-Bellis and James McAtee, one of his best friends and now a clubmate.
“He was a No 10 and quite often he would give me the ball and we just had that really good relationship off the pitch and it translated on to the pitch,” Delap says of McAtee. “If we didn’t win, we’d all be fuming. It probably instilled that winning mentality into us early. I think it’s worked because you can see from that team that almost everyone is playing somewhere in the Premier League, abroad, the Championship and that is probably because we pushed each other so much.”
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Delap made his Forest debut as a substitute at Anfield last weekend, his first notable action a quick throw-in that led to the penalty scored by Morgan Gibbs-White to earn a second-half lead. Only after the 2-2 draw did Glasner discover that Delap’s father, Rory, who played for Southampton and Stoke, among others, knew a thing or two about throws. “I said: your father will be proud of you,” says Forest’s head coach. So, has Liam got a mammoth throw in his armoury? “No, I don’t think so,” he replies. “I would never, anyway: I’m a striker, I need to be in the box.”
Delap relishes the blood and thunder of battle. Glasner loves how Forest’s marquee signing stands up to centre-backs, making the point that defenders are hardly “hugging and kissing you all the time” in the heat of duels. But Delap, who spent a decade at Derby before joining City, says he has learned to harness his aggression on the field, after periods of getting into trouble when he was a youngster.
“You have to be careful, but not shy away from who you are,” he says. “I’m always going to fight for everything, always be aggressive, determined. It goes back to the point about my brother, being little kids in the garden, going at each other: that’s me. Sometimes you need to control it and sometimes you need to be careful, but I think I play at my best when I’m on that edge of being … being horrible.”
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