Nottingham Forest have agreed 40 million euros for Ousmane Diomande, and Sporting are selling again
Forest have a deal in place with Sporting for the Ivory Coast centre-back, with a medical and a five-year contract to follow. It is the first big call of Oliver Glasner’s summer, and he still wants three more players.
Aug 10, 2026
Nottingham Forest have agreed a deal with Sporting for the centre-back Ousmane Diomande, worth a reported 40 million euros with another five million in add-ons. That is roughly 34 million pounds, and it would be one of the bigger fees Forest have paid for a defender. The medical is the last thing standing between the deal and an announcement, with a five-year contract waiting at the end of it.
Nothing is signed. Sporting kept him for their opening league weekend, and he did not travel for a medical over the weekend, so this is a deal that has been agreed rather than done.
Who Forest are buying
Diomande is 22, born in Abidjan, and arrived in Europe by an unglamorous route. Midtjylland signed him in January 2022, loaned him to Mafra in Portugal’s second tier that August, and Sporting bought him five months later for 7.5 million euros. On the current numbers that is a return of more than five times the outlay in three and a half years, which is the sort of trade Sporting have made a habit of.
He is 6ft 3in, right-footed, and plays the modern version of the job: a defender expected to start moves as well as end them. That is the profile Glasner has tended to want at the back, and it is the part of his game that carries the fee.
He has two Portuguese league titles and a Taça de Portugal from his time at Sporting, and he was part of the Ivory Coast squad that won the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations at home. He made his senior debut for them in September 2023 and went to this summer’s World Cup in Emerse Fae’s squad.
Glasner’s list is still four names long
Oliver Glasner took the Forest job in July and inherited a squad that had just lost its best player. Elliot Anderson went to Manchester City on 2 July for 116 million pounds, a British transfer record at the time, since eclipsed by the 117 million pounds Chelsea paid for Morgan Rogers. Forest have been sitting on that money since.
They have not spent much of it. Xaver Schlager arrived on a free from RB Leipzig, reuniting with the coach he worked under at Wolfsburg, and that is the extent of the summer so far. Glasner has said he wants a midfielder, a centre-back, a right-back and a striker. Diomande covers one of the four, and there are three weeks of the window left.
Whether 40 million is good value depends on which Diomande turns up. He made 17 league appearances last season, 15 of them starts, which is a lighter workload than the fee suggests, and the Premier League has broken better-credentialled defenders than him. But 22-year-old centre-backs with a title record and a World Cup on the CV do not usually come out of Lisbon at that price, and Forest were never going to get one cheaply once they had 116 million in the bank and everybody knew it.
Sporting keep selling, and keep winning anyway
This is becoming the shape of every Sporting summer. Morten Hjulmand, the captain, went to Atletico Madrid for 40 million euros in July. Trincao went to Al-Ahli. Viktor Gyokeres left before either of them. The club sells its best player, banks a fee that looks enormous against what it paid, and reloads.
They opened the new Primeira Liga season with a 2-2 draw away at Estrela da Amadora, which is not the start a defending contender wants and is the kind of result that gets read differently depending on who has just left. Whether the model keeps holding is the question Lisbon has been asking for three summers now. So far the answer has been yes, and the trophy cabinet backs it up.
For Forest, the calculation is simpler. They have money, a coach with a clear shopping list, and a defender who has already won things at 22. If the medical goes the way everyone expects, they will have one of the four names crossed off by the end of the week.