John McGinn

[SamTheMouse]

Just having him on the pitch will give the other players a mental lift. We've been short of a leader. Could make all the difference.

[Ian.]

The three of them are our heart, our brain and our backbone…

It would be like watching the Wizard of Oz without the Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow.

[eamonn]

Of all the players we miss the most, it has to be McGinn and Kamara. To lose them both and Tielemans, is as proved catastrophic!

Welcome back skipper.

I think you could make a case for any of them being our most important player.

Yep, you’re probably right. We have (when fit) the best midfield in Europe.

My Chelsea colleague says they do. We asked a neutral. He said Everton *shrug*

[paul_e]

It really depends who you count as the midfield but, as a unit:

Kamara Onana
McGinn Tielemans Rogers

is as good a midfield as any in the world, when that was our regular starting group for a few months we were the in-form team in Europe despite Ollie being out of form.

[Rigadon]

Yep.  It makes me sad looking at it!

[Beard82]

I think McGinn and Kamara are the two biggest losses.  Kamara because he is amazing.

McGinn just brings so much you can play him in any roll and he’ll give a good perfomance - his tenacity and guile has been much missed particularly when we’re up against it

[Somniloquism]

Chosen in the Scotland squad. Please don't play too much Clarkey.

[LeeB]

I think McGinn and Kamara are the two biggest losses.  Kamara because he is amazing.

McGinn just brings so much you can play him in any roll and he’ll give a good perfomance - his tenacity and guile has been much missed particularly when we’re up against it

But the Tielemans is the valve, and without him we don't look half as effective in the final third. I said elsewhere that you could make a serious argument for any of the three being our best and most imprortant player

[brontebilly]

Where was McGinn playing v Man United? Kind of up front with Ollie and kind of nowhere.

[TheToffnar]

That's unfair. We looked reasonably solid until he went off.

[dorsetvillian]

We did look a lot more solid and controlled with McGinn and Barkley in the midfield. It was very comfortable for Villa and Utd were struggling to break us down. We also had 3 or 4 very promising transitions which all fell apart with Watkins. The same type of transitions where Utd scored twice in the second half.

[Drummond]

I think McGinn and Kamara are the two biggest losses.  Kamara because he is amazing.

McGinn just brings so much you can play him in any roll and he’ll give a good perfomance - his tenacity and guile has been much missed particularly when we’re up against it

But the Tielemans is the valve, and without him we don't look half as effective in the final third. I said elsewhere that you could make a serious argument for any of the three being our best and most imprortant player

And that's exactly it. They all bring something different, and complementary, that no other individual can replicate to that standard.

To lose all three at the same time is just terrible luck. No team would cope.

[TheToffnar]

Great article from Tanswell this morning:


It may not be immediately obvious, but Demi Lovato and John McGinn share a mutual connection.

Despite one being a child prodigy Disney star who went on to forge a singing and acting career, and the other a tough, thickset, Premier League midfielder, they have one commonality. Both reached out to Natalie Kollars, a fitness performance specialist whose extensive background concentrates on individual training for high-end athletes.

Primarily, Kollars works with athletes from U.S. sports, including the NFL, NHL and, intriguingly, members of Special Forces units within the military. Her expertise, as illustrated by Levato and McGinn, often crosses differing rubicons.

“I actually went on tour with Demi Lovato for a little while,” Kollars, who leads the fitness performance company, Fortis, tells The Athletic. “When I got a gym in LA, she was looking for a new trainer at the time. Demi came in for a trial session with me, and we hit it off. I worked with her for months, leading up to her ‘Future Now Tour’.

“So while John is running on a soccer field, Demi dances and sings and is an entertainer for hours, night after night. We weren’t doing sprinting and deceleration, or agility quite as much, but her level of conditioning to continue to project her voice and be a presence on stage needed to be at an elite level.

“We worked on being very strong and mobile, relating specifically to her dancing, and then on the conditioning side, being able to recover after shows and sustain a high level of activity during those shows.”

Despite the obvious differences, McGinn’s intentions were not too dissimilar. After all, the Aston Villa captain’s core strength is his endurance, charging from one end of the pitch to the other and, as his manager Unai Emery says through a grin from time to time, “giving supporters Super John McGinn”.

In a sporting and entertainment world of marginal gains, Kollars specialises in improving movement and agility. She welcomes athletes from multiple sports in their respective off-seasons; figures who are prepared to test themselves in the formidable climates of Arizona, where Kollars is now based.

NFL athletes are frequent clients, with Kollars having worked with a long list of players, which includes Richie Incognito and Super Bowl winner Chandler Jones.

“Something about Richie and how long he’d been in the league, his reputation, his size, and everything about him did kind of intimidate me,” Kollars smiles. “I thought: ‘OK, this is someone I most certainly need to gain the trust of if this is going to go well.’ I made it a priority to build a strong relationship with him.

“By the end, he thanked me because he felt I had helped him, so that meant a lot.

“Normally, I will work with a group of athletes all training together. I would coach them Monday through Friday, with the recovery day on Wednesday. Depending on whether it was early off-season or late, the structure within the sessions will look different.

“For NFL guys, half of the time is spent on the field training linear speed, whether it’s acceleration, top-end speed or change of direction, so lots of plyometrics and medicine ball throws.

“The other half is in the weight room, focusing on strength, power and building the engine of the athlete.”

“John’s agent, David (Threlfall), reached out by email in May last year,” Kollars recalls. “I didn’t know who he was mentioning initially, because he didn’t say John’s name.

“But as it transpired, John was coming out here at the end of June, and David introduced himself, saying he had a Premier League player coming over to the States, and he wanted him to work with me. He was asking if I had time in my schedule.

“Not just because I played soccer in my youth, but an email like that is always super exciting: you have the opportunity to hopefully make an impact on someone before they’re about to go off into a really important season.

“In the second or third email, David mentioned his name. I mean, as you know, John is awesome, so I was thrilled right away.”

In a wide-ranging interview in November, McGinn credited his pre-season in Arizona for his impressive start to the 2025-26 campaign, where he felt fitter and sharper than ever before.

“She absolutely beasted me,” McGinn said. “It was 45-degree heat. It was really, really tough. The benefits of that were that I came back in the best shape I’ve been in for a long time.”

Kollars laughs when The Athletic reads McGinn’s words. For a man from Clydebank, a town on the edge of Glasgow, Scotland, running in the intense Arizona sun was unforgiving. Kollars would be quick to push the 31-year-old into the cold tub immediately after sessions to aid his recovery and to simply cool him down.

“The poor guy came over in the hottest time of our season,” says Kollars. “The heat is no joke, even to people who live here all year round. But John coming over was obviously a shock for him. But he did fantastic. His work ethic is just top-notch.

“I was strategic — I used a high-low model. So days where there’s higher demand on the athlete, there’s less demand the next day. Although John may argue they all felt high because of the heat, I was strategic about the days I was going to push him. I actually wanted to put in a bit more active rest and recovery in the programme, but John didn’t want that. He wanted to do less recovery.”

McGinn came to Arizona in recognition that the upcoming season was perhaps his most important.

Villa were bruised after missing out on the Champions League in 2024-25 and required an upturn, while Scotland were fixated on reaching the World Cup, a mission they duly accomplished. McGinn will end up returning to the U.S. in a few months for football’s biggest global tournament, where his durability will be tested again.

“His body adapted to the training incredibly well, which I wasn’t shocked about,” adds Kollars. “He transformed both from a conditioning standpoint, from a mental toughness standpoint, with the heat, and then he had the goal of going back and being leaner as well.

“He had his nutrition and diet really dialled in. He worked with a top chef I collaborate with regularly to prepare his food. John does all the right things of sticking to the plan.

“He was burning a lot of calories in our sessions, so we had to make sure that while he wanted to become leaner, he was not in too much of a calorie deficit because we were chasing training adaptations. Balancing all of that was important.”

Kollars was raised in Canada, just outside Toronto, and spent her formative years playing an array of sports. She was an attacking midfielder in football, so could identify the movement traits McGinn relied upon, before studying Kinesiology — the study of body mechanics — at university.

McGinn’s weekly plan would involve 70 per cent of training taking place on a grass football pitch with two-hour sessions, before spending the rest of the time in the gym.

“As much as John doesn’t love the weight room — that he was clear with me — his muscle mass is significant,” Kollars explains. “He’s such a sturdy player, but that doesn’t at all take away from his very unique conditioning capabilities.

“You picture a marathon runner versus an NFL running back — John has a unique mix of both. He is incredibly conditioned, but has that muscle mass, which is partly why he’s so successful. He can hold off players and is a power player, but is conditioned, so he’s a unique mix of both.

“We spent a lot of time on acceleration and linear speed training, and then a lot of change of direction. With the position John plays, he is all over the pitch, so he needs a huge emphasis on conditioning, both on the aerobic side, like the size of his gas tank, but then anaerobically, with the number of sprints he does in a game.”

McGinn returned from a knee injury earlier in March, having missed two months of the campaign. It was no coincidence that Villa’s alarming decline corresponded with his absence, alongside that of Boubacar Kamara and Youri Tielemans.

McGinn is the team’s intensity driver, and without him, Villa appear increasingly stale.

Off the pitch, his professionalism and approach to training have been cited by several sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, as sorely missed when he is out injured. McGinn pushes and maintains standards, and is relentless in his desire to improve — a character trait that struck Kollars.

“Even when the heat was absolutely crushing him in Arizona — I’m talking 45 degrees Celsius sun in the middle of the day beating down — the poor guy just kept putting on loads of sunscreen and, no matter how hard the conditioning was or how hot it was, he was dialled in on reaching the goals and times I had set out for him. He holds himself to an incredibly high standard.”

The plan is for McGinn to return to Kollars following the World Cup to start preparations all over again, with his first experience in Arizona extremely productive.

First, though, McGinn aims to be a difference-maker in Villa securing Champions League qualification and playing a leading role with Scotland at the World Cup.

“He’s definitely a joy to work with. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be a small part of his journey,” adds Kollars.

“It has been an incredible season for him, and I’m excited to see how the rest of it plays out.”