The East Midlands derby is, geographically speaking, an odd thing to argue about. Forest's closest neighbours are Notts County, just across the Trent, and Derby County, twenty minutes up the road. Leicester's nearest rival by distance is Coventry City. Yet on the maps that matter to football supporters, the maps drawn in pub conversations and away-end songs, Leicester and Nottingham face each other across a strip of motorway and a shared sense that the other lot don't quite belong on the same pitch. They are the two largest cities in the East Midlands, and that is enough. The fixture has been contested 111 times since 1901. Every meeting, win or loss, is filed away in the long collective memory.

Some derby stories are too strange to be invented. On 28 August 2007, Leicester were losing 1-0 at the City Ground when their midfielder Clive Clarke collapsed in the dressing room at half-time. The match was abandoned. When it was replayed three weeks later, Leicester let Forest score from the kickoff unopposed, an act of footballing chivalry repaying the goal Forest had been denied. Then Leicester proceeded to win 3-2 anyway. That gesture, the free goal, is the kind of detail that survives in derby lore long after the season's table is forgotten. Clarke recovered. The match remains, in the dry language of the record books, the only time in modern English football that one team has gifted the other a goal at kickoff.

Some loyalties travel. Peter Shilton, perhaps the greatest English goalkeeper of his generation, built his reputation at Leicester before winning two European Cups with Forest. Martin O'Neill played for Forest under Brian Clough, then managed Leicester, then managed Forest. Steve Cooper took Forest back to the Premier League after twenty-three years, then took the job at Leicester. Wes Morgan crossed the other way, leaving Forest in 2012 to captain Leicester to one of the most improbable league titles in sporting history. For every supporter who treats the rivalry as tribal, there is a player whose career stitches the two cities together. Both can be true. Football has always made room for that kind of contradiction.

For twenty-three years the two clubs orbited each other in lower divisions, glimpsing one another in cup ties and play-off campaigns but never meeting where it mattered most. Then, in October 2022, they were drawn together in the Premier League. Both were struggling. Leicester sat twentieth, Forest nineteenth. Leicester won 4-0 in a game that did neither side's confidence any favours about the season ahead. Three months later, on 15 January 2023, Forest reversed the result 2-0 at the City Ground. By the time spring came, one of them would be relegated, the other clinging on. The rivalry, dormant for so long, had returned with the urgency of teams who needed every point and could not stand the thought of losing them to each other.

Not all of the derby's history belongs on the pitch. Eighteen people were arrested after a match in 1977. Six Forest fans were arrested after a 91st-minute Leicester winner in May 2013 sent their rivals to a play-off place. A Forest supporter was arrested in 2014 for racist abuse directed at Leicester fans on Twitter; another, in 2002, was the target of objects thrown by his own supporters because he had once worn the wrong shirt. In February 2022, Leicester fans damaged a bar in Nottingham before kickoff, and during the match one of them ran onto the pitch and attacked a Forest player who was celebrating a goal. The clubs and the local police have spent decades trying to keep matchday from becoming something uglier. The work is constant. Most who travel between the two cities for a derby do so peaceably, but the minority who do not have shaped how the fixture is policed and remembered.