Liam Delap, the Forest striker whose price keeps outrunning his goals

The first goal started inside his own half. Xaver Schlager won the ball from Elliot Anderson in midfield, Liam Delap took it in his stride, carried it towards the Manchester City box and drove a right-footed shot past Gianluigi Donnarumma. The second came late, on the break, from a Morgan Gibbs-White pass and an angled finish with his left foot. Nottingham Forest had not won a league game at the City Ground all season. They had not even scored there. The striker who ended both droughts learned the game in City’s academy.

It was neat timing for a player whose career has turned into a running argument about price. Each of Delap’s senior transfers has cost more than the one before, and each fee has arrived ahead of the evidence. Forest have just paid the biggest sum in their history for a centre-forward who scored once in the Premier League for his previous club. So the question that follows him into every match is simple to state and hard to settle: was his season at Ipswich Town the real Liam Delap, or the exception?

Football came with the family. He was born in Winchester on 8 February 2003, while his father, Rory Delap, was playing for Southampton; Rory would later become a Republic of Ireland international known across England for the long throws he launched at Stoke City. His parents met at Derby County, where his mother, Helen, worked as a physiotherapist, and his maternal grandmother, Ann, became the first female physio of the England cricket team. His paternal grandfather’s family comes from Letterkenny, in County Donegal, which is why Ireland can still pick him. His younger brother, Finn, plays for Burton Albion.

Delap joined Derby’s academy at six and spent ten years there, studying at The Ecclesbourne School in Duffield, before Manchester City signed him in January 2019. At City he scored at a rate that made the club’s staff take notice: 24 goals in 20 games for the under-23 side. In September 2020, at seventeen, he made his first-team debut against Bournemouth in the League Cup and scored after 18 minutes. Pep Guardiola praised him afterwards and kept him training with the senior squad. Three days later he played in the Premier League against Leicester City. Then came the long middle part that most academy strikers at City know well: a foot injury, a handful of substitute appearances, a Champions League debut off the bench in Lisbon, and very little else.

The loans did the shaping. Stoke City took him for the 2022-23 season and he scored three times before City recalled him in January and sent him to Preston North End. At Hull City, in 2023-24, he scored on his debut at Norwich, finished with eight league goals and was the club’s player of the month in December. At 1.87 metres, he had become the kind of forward defenders have to deal with physically.

Ipswich Town, newly promoted, bought him outright in July 2024 in a deal worth up to £20 million. He gave them more than a relegated side usually gets from anyone. His two goals against Aston Villa made him the first Ipswich player to score twice in a Premier League match since Marcus Bent in 2002; at the end of December he scored and set up the other goal in a 2-0 win over Chelsea. He finished the season with 12 league goals, top scorer at a club that went straight back down, and collected the club’s young player, players’ player and goal of the season awards. He was also one of six nominees for the PFA Young Player of the Year.

Chelsea triggered his release clause, reported at £30 million, in June 2025, and for a few weeks the move looked charmed. He set up a goal on his debut at the Club World Cup in the United States, scored his first Chelsea goal against Espérance de Tunis and came on in the final as Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain to win the tournament. Then the season proper began. He injured a hamstring at Fulham at the end of August, an injury Enzo Maresca said would keep him out until December, and in December he hurt his shoulder against Bournemouth. He did score in the Champions League against Barcelona, and in January he finally got his first Premier League goal, again at Fulham. It was also his last for the club. He went 26 matches without scoring, and in May he came off the bench for the closing minutes of the FA Cup final, lost 1-0 to Manchester City.

The number that now travels with him is three goals in 47 games. It is a harsh number and not an entirely fair one. Injuries broke up his first half-season, Chelsea changed head coach in January, and he started only 12 league matches in a crowded squad. Tim Sherwood put the generous version plainly on Sky Sports: Chelsea “just did not work for him”, and a striker needs a manager who will play him every week. The less comfortable version is that Delap’s value has been set by single seasons and release clauses, by a market that paid for Ipswich’s goals rather than for a body of work. He is still uncapped at senior level by England, despite a full run through the youth teams that included a European Under-19 title in 2022. Ireland remain an open door; he has not walked through it.

Forest took the bet anyway. On 27 August 2026 they signed him on a five-year contract for an initial £45 million, with another £5 million in add-ons, beating the club-record fee they had paid for Omari Hutchison a year earlier and handing Chelsea a profit of around £20 million. Oliver Glasner, Sherwood argued, is a coach who likes to build around a big centre-forward. Delap made his debut as a substitute in a 2-2 draw at Anfield and scored his first Forest goal in a 2-1 win at Villa Park in September.

The night against City, on 7 November, gave the move its first real argument. His two goals lifted Forest out of the relegation zone and made him only the second player, after Nicolas Anelka with Bolton in 2006, to score twice against City in the Premier League after playing for them in the competition. Glasner, asked whether the win was a turning point, answered with an Austrian saying: one swallow does not make a summer. The same applies to his striker. Delap is twenty-three, contracted to 2031, and playing for a side that needs his goals more than Chelsea ever did. For the first time since Ipswich, the fee is no longer the most interesting thing about him.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, Premier League, Manchester City, chelsea, Nottingham Forest, Liam Delap

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