If you were a multi-millionaire, would you sponsor Forest?

If you won one of those record-breaking lottery prizes that runs into £100 million or more – would you spend any of it helping Nottingham Forest get back into the Premier League? After all, it wouldn’t take much spending in the January transfer window to give us that little extra fillip we need to get into one of the automatic promotion spots now would it?

Now I imagine that lots of die-hard fans have answered a resounding “yes” to this question, having had a bet on the UK’s favourite lotto but with a few provisos built in to the equation, which is always the conundrum of course. That’s because people who really are in this situation in life often want a say in how the money is spent, understandably. And the trouble with that is that they may not be the experts they think they are.

We all think we could do a better job of running Forest, particularly when things are going badly – but it’s unlikely to be true in reality. Most armchair pundits, including some of the real pundits on TV, couldn’t really run a club or spend the money wisely. And how many pundits now waxing lyrical on TV have actually tried management but been found wanting? A few like Alan Shearer, Roy Keane and Gareth Southgate spring immediately to mind.

So it’s difficult to get it right, particularly in today’s big money football era. And, if the truth be told, it would have to be one hell of a lottery win to make much difference unless you decided to give the whole amount to the club which, of course, wouldn’t happen – unless, perhaps, you had no family and been told you had a matter of days to live.

Otherwise, we must hope for a real benefactor like a Jack Walker, Roman Abramovich, or Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan – or perhaps Forest should start buying a few lottery tickets of their own?