Sports 1 August 2026

Sporting beat Nottingham Forest 4-1 and Rafael Nel scored twice

In their last run-out before the league, Sporting beat Nottingham Forest 4-1 at the Algarve Stadium, with goals from Gonçalo Inácio, Doumbia and a Rafael Nel brace.

Pre-season friendlies count for nothing, everybody knows that. Then you get an afternoon like Friday’s at the Algarve Stadium, where an academy kid puts two past a Premier League side, and suddenly they count for a little.

How did Sporting v Nottingham Forest finish?

4-1 to Sporting. It started badly: Igor Jesus put Forest ahead inside two minutes, which in a friendly is usually the prologue to a long afternoon.

It was not. Gonçalo Inácio headed the equaliser on 14 minutes and the game changed hands from there. Issa Doumbia made it two on 59, and Rafael Nel took care of the other two, closing out the scoring and the pre-season with the kind of display that makes a manager rethink his first eleven.

What does it say about the season ahead?

It was Sporting’s seventh straight win in preparation, a number that is both flattering and misleading — opponents vary, intensity is not the same, nobody goes in at full throttle. But some signals are not noise: putting four past an English top-flight club, with the back line settling after conceding early, is not the same as strolling through an August training exercise.

The name to file away is Rafael Nel. An academy forward scoring twice in the final rehearsal before the league opener changes the conversation about squad depth, especially in a summer when Alvalade spent more time debating departures than arrivals.

What comes next?

Now it counts. Sporting go into the 2026/27 Primeira Liga without the season’s first trophy on the line — that one is settled in Coimbra, where FC Porto and Torreense meet in the Supertaça — and in a market that keeps moving, as António Silva’s transfer to Bournemouth showed. Fixtures and match sheets are published on Sporting’s official site.

By Vasco Almada

Image: YantsImages / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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