Given where Nottingham Forest were a little over a year ago, and given how immensely successful Oliver Glasner was at his previous posting, it’s difficult not to view everything that has happened since the summer as a deep disappointment.

Friday night’s 1-1 draw with Ipswich Town means that Forest remain firmly in the relegation conversation, and the mutterings about Glasner’s future are beginning to intensify. He took up a role at a club with high expectations and minimal patience for poor results, and hasn’t hit the ground at any speed.

Questions are starting to be asked about the club’s transfer policy, about the cause of their struggles in front of goal, and whether a famously restless owner will give Glasner any time to get things back on track. So will we see yet another sacking at the City Ground in the coming weeks, and who’s really to blame for Forest’s recent form and failures?

Will Nottingham Forest sack Oliver Glasner?

The marriage between Glasner and Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis was always likely to be a combustible one. Marinakis is not a man whose patience has ever passed a test, and Glasner has an anti-authoritarian streak which has caused diplomatic ructions wherever he has gone.

Glasner fell out with Crystal Palace’s board over their transfer strategy and publicly chewed out Eintracht Frankfurt’s owners when he perceived their investment to be insufficient to allow him to succeed. There has been a consistent pattern to Glasner’s career: Success, followed by in fighting, followed by his departure. It was difficult to imagine a lengthy honeymoon period between a coach and an owner who both treat compromise as an alien concept.

Still, if Glasner does get the sack in the near future, it will be down to results on the pitch rather than anything going on behind the scenes. Forest have won just one of their first nine games of the season. They have lost to Crystal Palace, Coventry City and now failed to beat Ipswich Town.

For a team with pretensions to European qualification – or at the very least a comfortable life clear of the bottom three – it hasn’t been good enough. It may be too early in the season for a fair judgement, but they look like relegation candidates.

Some sides might give a proven manager like Glasner the time to turn things around, but every Nottingham Forest manager’s time is borrowed under Marinakis. Ange Postecoglou lasted just 39 days. Sean Dyche less than four months. Vítor Pereira got the club’s house in order and steered them clear of the drop and was fired anyway.

Glasner has already been given as much leash as any of his predecessors were permitted, and while Marinakis has not made any public show of his frustration just yet – perhaps because he isn’t meant to be a ‘person of significant control’ of the club in order to comply with UEFA regulations – it’s hard to imagine that the status quo will be accepted for much longer.

“Sometimes you try a huge effort and things don't work,” Glasner told Sky Sports after Friday’s draw at Portman Road. "You are encouraging them to keep going because you have these periods in sport and life.

"When I see the way we play, the spirit and the chances, the only way now is to stay patient and not make the problem bigger. It's a question of time, and maybe in a few weeks you will be asking why we are scoring so many goals."

Depending on your perspective, those are either the comments of a man who exhibits admirable calm during a storm or a man who has precious little idea of what he can do to turn things around, and a man who’s trending towards spending Christmas with his family and a generous severance package. To compound the issue, their upcoming fixtures make for a gruesome prospect.

Each of their next four opponents qualified for Europe next season: Manchester City and Chelsea at home, Brentford and Bournemouth away. They won’t face a fixture one might perceive as being ‘easy’ until they travel to Hull in December. Glasner needs to find a win, probably two, from that run in order to save his career at the City Ground.

Between the fixtures, Marinakis’ trigger-happy approach to hiring and firing, and Glasner’s unwillingness to play nicely with his superiors, it’s difficult to envision a long stay for the Austrian as it stands. The question feels less like whether Glasner will be sacked, than whether doing so would make a blind bit of difference.

The stats say Glasner is doing everything right – but there’s blame to go around

The 1-1 draw with Ipswich was doubly frustrating because Nottingham Forest had, for long periods, been the better team. They had 17 shots on goal to the hosts’ seven, 2.31xG to 0.46. They should have won.

It’s a familiar pattern. They had 11 more shots and 0.93xG more than Crystal Palace, but lost. 14 more shots and 0.43 more xG than Coventry, but lost. The statistics keep telling the same story: Forest are playing better football than their opponents but losing anyway. They are creating but not scoring.

Which begs the question as to whether their form is really Glasner’s fault. The manager can only set his side up to create chances. He can’t put the ball in the back of the net for them.

When he quipped that perhaps journalists would be ‘asking why we are scoring so many goals’ in the near future, Glasner was perhaps anticipating (or hoping) that his side would snap back to the statistical mean. The xG model may cause a number of eyes to roll, but it’s usually not far from the truth – teams and players who are under or overperforming tend to revert back to expectations sooner or later.

But will that happen in the timeframe that Glasner needs it to in order to save his job? And, to posit a slightly more philosophical question, how much blame can be ascribed to coaching when players like Morgan Gibbs-White and Liam Delap have been so inept in front of goal, and how much to the players themselves?

The statistics suggest that the tactics are working, but the players aren’t. Is that down to motivation and training, or is it just a matter of bad form and bad luck? Or did Forest, perhaps, sign the wrong players in the first place?

Delap was impressive in patches for Ipswich when he first made it as far as the Premier League but has failed to find any kind of meaningful form since, and his struggles are a continuation of everything that happened to him at Stamford Bridge. So did Forest make a mistake by signing him in the first place when they had the funds to go for a striker with a better recent record?

Their transfer team could surely have done a better job on the midfield. Losing Elliot Anderson was a blow but also provided them with an enormous amount of spending money – and here we are, with Glasner pairing free agent signing Xavier Schlager with James McAtee, a player whose best position is debatable but which is surely not central midfield.

One can blame Glasner for consistently selecting Delap, of course, or for failing to find ways to snap him out of a funk that has dragged on for some time. One can wonder why players like Chris Wood, Ibrahim Sangaré, Ousmane Diomande and Callum Hudson-Odoi were left on the bench against Ipswich. But one can also wonder why he isn’t working with better resources in the first place.

Glasner doesn’t usually show the slightest bit of patience with teams who don’t sign the players he needs or wants. Marinakis doesn’t usually show the slightest bit of patience with managers who don’t provide immediate results. It’s hard to imagine this ending well. It’s also hard to imagine things getting much better unless Forest fix the fundamental issues with the squad in January. The manager can only do so much.