Speaking on The Big Interview with Graham Hunter, Aston Villa star John McGinn has shared just how close he came to joining Nottingham Forest back in 2017.
The Scot was playing at Hibs at the time, and his good performances in Scotland inevitably attracted interest from down south.
Nottingham Forest were on the verge of signing him in 2017, but McGinn didn’t want to push through the move away from Hibs at that time.
“The summer before (joining Aston Villa), I was very close to going to Nottingham Forest on deadline day. Ironically it was Mark Warburton who was in charge at the time. But on deadline day it was tough because you have to balance when this opportunity was coming around. I was loving my time at Hibs, but I wanted to test myself at the higher level,” McGinn said.
“Full credit to my agent at the time, it would have been easy for him to do what I was being pressurised by Forest to do and push through the move, but it’s not in my nature, it’s not what I wanted to do and he was fully on-board with that.”
Of course, McGinn would go on to sign for Aston Villa the next summer and play a key part in their promotion campaign.
We can only wonder how different Villa and Forest’s destinies would have been if McGinn ended up at the City Ground in 2017.
Would Villa have won the playoffs in 2019 without McGinn? Could the Scot have driven Forest to their own promotion campaign? We’ll never know, but it is certainly an interesting point to ponder.
McGinn certainly would have been a bargain for Forest. After all, the Birmingham Mail recently claimed that Villa value McGinn at around £50m.
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