When Nottingham Forest announced Ryan Yates had extended his 19-year association with the club in the summer, they released a video clip of their captain pootling past the City Ground on the waters of the River Trent, on board the Nottingham Princess, an 80ft double-decker cruiser. After all, he is the unofficial prince of Nottingham, Mr Forest to so many. But Yates, constantly trying to improve his game, always wants more. “I genuinely wanted to get in, go underwater, there would be a piece of paper floating on top,” he says, bowing his head, grabbing my pen and notepad, “and then come up with a snorkel on and sign it. But they wouldn’t let me, they were pretty worried.”
Not for the first time, laughter fills the boardroom at Forest’s training base and it is a story that offers a snapshot of Yates’s warm, down-to-earth persona. This is his third season as a Premier League midfielder but he carries fond memories of his journey to this point, including his professional debut for Barrow, a non-league trip to North Ferriby in August 2016. “I stayed at my mum and dad’s the night before, I was quite nervous and they drove me to the game. The club put my shirt up in the dressing room, No 22 … they ripped the name and number off a shirt from someone who had left and stuck mine on, so you could see the outline of someone else’s name and number. The shirt was huge … it must have been an XL. It was ginormous. I watched my clips from that game about six months ago for a laugh; I was running around like a headless chicken.”
Yates had spells at Shrewsbury, Scunthorpe and Notts County and is part of a select group of players to have scored in the top five divisions of English football. He scored his first Forest goal five years ago but is renowned for his aggression and all-action nature rather than goalscoring and for a while supporters have sung: “If Yatesy scores, we’re in the Trent.” It explains the goggles celebration after he opened the scoring at Leicester in October, his second league goal since Forest returned to the top flight after 23 years, and his desire to dive in after signing that new four-year deal. “I’ve got another celebration lined up if I score. Are you watching I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!? That’s my clue. It’s a good one.”
Yates, a self-deprecating character, is smashing company during an illuminating hour, discussing how Roy Keane made Forest’s players sharpen up on timekeeping while assistant to Martin O’Neill, rolling an ankle in training but playing through the pain to make his Forest debut against Bury, enrolling on the Uefa B licence coaching course with Harry Toffolo, the coffee club with his teammates or his power pose, a technique floated by his cousin, who is training to be a psychologist, which he exhibits as he has his portrait taken. “I’ve not really thought of it in terms of impostor syndrome. I truly believe I should be at this level and I can still improve and get to the next level. I’m always trying to achieve that extra 1%. If putting my hands on my hips and sticking my chest out in the tunnel can make me play better then I am going to do it.”
Yates, something of a great survivor given the churn of players across such a volatile game, credits his hunger to better himself as a factor behind his staying power. Taking his first steps into coaching, he hopes, “might improve my game now. I think it will help me become a better leader, develop me and take me out of my comfort zone, which I’m always looking to do.” He was a stickler for ensuring his nutrition was good even when on loan as an 18-year-old living between Lincoln, where he was born, and Nottingham, driving a beat-up Vauxhall Corsa with more than 100,000 miles on the clock. It was then he became a regular at a Premier Inn in Oldham, near where Barrow trained.
“When it’s you and the hotel room, what can you conjure up? I’d buy half a chicken from Tesco, a packet of rice, some spinach – I couldn’t boil broccoli because I just had a kettle – so I would pour a bit of water into the bag of spinach, squeeze it out, so it became wilted spinach. God, those were the days. I remember just thinking: ‘It’s all going to be worth it.’ I had so much good information nutritionally and how to look after myself off the pitch from the academy here. I think it was driven by the fear of not doing everything right and if it didn’t quite work out or I didn’t start, then I’d think it was because of that. I just wanted no regrets. I wanted to be the best version of myself.
“I became friends with the goalkeeper, Joel Dixon, and we started sharing so we could split the hotel costs. I was like: ‘This is perfect.’ There was one double bed and one single. ‘How are we going to divvy this up?’ He’d have his digestive biscuits and go out for pizza; I used to bring couscous in a little plastic tub and pour boiling water on it. It makes me appreciate everything I have here. If I see some of the young lads taking it for granted a bit, I’m just like: ‘You need a good loan to Barrow.’” Yates laughs as he wags his index finger.
The bruises and bumps on his shins are war scars from the heat of battle. Yates, who turned 27 on Thursday, is a one-club man in an era of very few. “It means a lot to me. There have been a lot of players through the door at Forest over the years. Myself and Neco Williams were talking the other day and he is the third-longest serving player at the club and he joined two years ago. It is pretty crazy.”
It is all a long way from the days of pre-match chip butties and watching Billy Sharp and Dexter Blackstock from the upper tier of the Bridgford Stand with his older brother, Lewis, and father, Andy. His time at Forest could have been up had the summer of 2018 panned out differently. The boy who joined Forest aged eight from Cherry Colts and whose top-floor academy digs were so close to the City Ground “you could almost touch its steel surround” was on the periphery.
“There were two days left of the window. Aitor Karanka said: ‘You can go on loan.’ On deadline day I was going to Hull City … I was outside their stadium but they didn’t call me. I think they took someone else, so I was fired up when we played Hull. I think people at Forest could see that even though I might have been a bit raw at the time, they could see how much it meant to me to play for the club and luckily I just held on for long enough.”
Forest have enjoyed an extraordinary start to the season, with Nuno Espírito Santo’s side fifth, level on points with Saturday’s opponents, Arsenal. “One of my first seasons in the first team, we just missed out on the playoffs [in 2019-20] and it was like ‘typical Forest’ after we had blown it against Stoke,” Yates says of when Forest failed to win any of their final six Championship matches and lost out on a playoff spot on the last day on goal difference.
“I always had something inside of me, especially after I broke into the first team, where I wanted to change that narrative of Forest. Derby and Forest had both been in the Championship for so many years, always underwhelming. I think the way that season ended was the best thing that could have happened in a strange way, for me, because it was like: ‘That is never happening again.’ Mentally, I really kicked on. The rest is history, I guess.
“My first season in the Premier League was a bit surreal. You’d go to the Etihad and think: ‘[Kevin] De Bruyne’s playing, I’ll try and get his shirt after the game.’ But I quickly came to realise that if you want to survive, or thrive, in the Premier League, that is not really the way to go about it. We did just survive in our first season. Underdog mentality: ‘Come on, we can nick a point.’ But now it’s: ‘We want to thrive.’ Going to Arsenal, an amazing team, we will go there to assert our authority on the game, like we did at Liverpool [Forest won 1-0 in September]. We are trying to get rid of that underdog mentality and just show how good we are, how much we have progressed as a club.”
Coffee is a theme that bookends conversation. It is hard to envisage too many players talking about their love for their La Marzocco espresso machine and he starts by providing a hazelnut latte. “It wasn’t very good latte art, so I covered it with a lid,” he chuckles, by way of introduction.
“Latte art is a little hobby of mine. I did a course where they taught you how to extract coffee and how to foam milk correctly. I bought my machine as a sort of treat to myself after promotion … It is a serious piece of kit. I use it most days. We have a barista here but if she is away, the lads are like: ‘Come on, Yatesy, give us a flat white.’” Has he mastered the tree from the Forest crest? “That is cheating because you can do it with a stencil, put it on top and sprinkle it with chocolate. I’m doing the proper art. My go-to is a flat white with a leaf.”
Before Yates heads to the revamped players’ lounge dotted with splashes of garibaldi red, home to pool and table tennis tables, and then to his house – he lives five minutes from the training ground – he has another piece of exclusive transfer news to share. “Get on this,” he says. “The barista here, Sammy, is full-time now. She is ace. She used to work at the coffee shop we go to, in West Bridgford. And now we’ve poached her … How good is that?”
