Miran Pavlin, currently director of national teams at the Slovenian Football Association (NZS), will become technical director of Nottingham Forest as the first Slovenian to serve on the management of an English Premier League club.

Pavlin, who played in the UEFA Euro 2000 and the 2002 FIFA World Cup as a member of the national team, revealed the news for the newspaper Delo. He will take up the new job on 15 July.

"I received an offer from the owner of Nottingham Forest, Evangelos Marinakis, who also owns Olympiakos and the Portuguese club Rio Ave. At 52 years old, I didn't think much," Pavlin told Delo.

"The Premier League is the best league in the world, and I got the chance to work in a conglomerate of three clubs. It's a huge challenge for me. We agreed about two weeks ago, and I also revealed my decision to the NZS president, Radenko Mijatović, before the match with England," he added, admitting his new job will not be an easy one.

Slovenia made it to the knock-out stage in this year's Euro in a historic first after drawing with Denmark, Serbia and England. They went on to concede to Portugal in a penalty shoot-out in the round of 16.

Pavlin thanked the Slovenian UEFA boss Aleksander Čeferin for giving him the opportunity to study at the governing body of European football. "There I built a wide network and made many contacts. UEFA makes you more visible, you are taken more seriously than you would be as a person coming from a smaller country," he said.

"It's the same with the national team: in the last qualifiers we were also taken more seriously because of Čeferin," he added.

Pavlin previously worked as an official at Slovenian top-tier clubs Olimpija, Koper, and Maribor.