Unai Emery

[Somniloquism]

Conference league comparison.

Qualifiers
W (Burnley Away)
L (Liverpool away)

Group Stage
W (Chelsea away)
D (Wolves away)
W (Luton home)
W (Fulham home)
W (Tottenham away)
W (Brentford away)

Knockouts
R16
L (Spurs home)
D (Spam away)

QF
W (Arse away)
W (Bournemouth home)

SF
L (Brighton away)
D (Liverpool home).

[Somniloquism]

Hopefully two real quality loans in like last January will give us a great boost in all competitions. One would replace Elliot in Europa squad.

[eamonn]

And Barkley, if he's still not back by Feb.

[Somniloquism]

Barkley is not officially in the squad. We are allowed one temp fillment if a player is injured for more the 70 days and that was Mings. Once Mings is "fit" he would replace Barkley again.

[Drummond]

Barkley is not officially in the squad. We are allowed one temp fillment if a player is injured for more the 70 days and that was Mings. Once Mings is "fit" he would replace Barkley again.

Teams can change the squad after the transfer window though, can't they?

[Somniloquism]

Yes, but I was pointing out we can't replace Barkley because he isn't in there officially to be replaced. As of now, I suspect Elliot definitely, Garcia probably and then we would need to replace one more from our current squad if we get three in.

Martinez
Bizot

Cash
Lindelof
Konsa
Digne
Torres
Mings* (Currently replaced by Barkley but officially still in there)
Garcia
Maatsen

McGinn
Tielemans
Sancho
Onana
Kamara

Elliot
Buendia
Watkins
Malen
Rogers.

[SaddVillan]

Conference league comparison.

Qualifiers
W (Burnley Away)
L (Liverpool away)

Group Stage
W (Chelsea away)
D (Wolves away)
W (Luton home)
W (Fulham home)
W (Tottenham away)
W (Brentford away)

Knockouts
R16
L (Spurs home)
D (Spam away)

QF
W (Arse away)
W (Bournemouth home)

SF
L (Brighton away)
D (Liverpool home).

In order to see if we've faced easier post Europe games this year compared to last season (if at all) , I have looked at the respective league positions of the teams we played post Europe this year and last season as well as our league position on  the dates we played the matches.

The league positions are a reasonable indicator of the form and strength of who we played.

Need to wait until the end of the league phase for a proper comparison

[usav]

Conference league comparison.

Qualifiers
W (Burnley Away)
L (Liverpool away)

Group Stage
W (Chelsea away)
D (Wolves away)
W (Luton home)
W (Fulham home)
W (Tottenham away)
W (Brentford away)

Knockouts
R16
L (Spurs home)
D (Spam away)

QF
W (Arse away)
W (Bournemouth home)

SF
L (Brighton away)
D (Liverpool home).

I could be wrong, but I feel like there was way less squad rotation 2 years ago.  Maybe explains why we ran out of steam in both the league and in Europe.  Last year we finished strong in the league and came up against a juggernaut in the QFs.

[OCD]

Emery seemed to change tactics around February time to using his maximum allowance of subs which helped keep players fit for the run-in. He's continued with that. Before then he wasn't rotating as much and it coincided with us having a lot of injuries.

[dcdavecollett]

Bogarde is missing from the squad above.

[Dave]

He's not in it - he's young enough and home-grown enough that he goes in the b-list and doesn't need to take up space in the main squad.

[paul_e]

Yep, this is Bogardes last year as a freebie but next year he'll take one of the club trained spots that we can't use right now.

[Somniloquism]

Yep, this is Bogardes last year as a freebie but next year he'll take one of the club trained spots that we can't use right now.

Still a freebie then really.

[jwarry]

Good article in the Sunday Times this morning.

Project Emery: how Villa's meticulous architect is building title challenge
Fourteen wins in 16 matches is perhaps unsurprising when you learn how coach prepares for matches 'like a pilgrimage to Mecca' and turns training drills into ballet
 
Jonathan Northcroft, Chief Football Correspondent

Things looked gloomy at the Stadium of Light. On September 21 Aston Villa failed to beat Sunderland despite leading and playing with an extra man for two thirds of the match. Five games in, Villa were in the bottom three of the Premier League with zero wins and one goal scored. The biggest crisis of Unai Emery's reign. He knew exactly what to do. The same. More of the same.

Emery addressed his players with passion about sticking to the identity he had instilled since becoming Villa head coach in October 2022; sticking to the game plan, keeping the same mentality and same embrace of hard work and tactical detail. Trust in who we are, things will turn, he said.

“There was no Al Pacino Any Given Sunday speech,” Villa's director of football operations, Damian Vidagany, told a supporters' function, referring to the famous movie moment where an American football coach (played by Pacino) transforms a broken team with incredible oratory. But Villa weren't broken and things did turn — through “determination, consistency, good habits and the emotional balance of the group”.

Four days after the 1-1 draw with Sunderland, Villa beat Bologna. Then they won against Fulham three days later and have barely stopped winning since. Thursday's Europa League victory away against Basel extended their run to 14 wins in 16, their best streak as a top-flight side since 1914; and a post on X by Vidagany after last Saturday's defeat of Arsenal encapsulated that identity, which Emery fought to preserve. Beneath a picture of substitutes and players mobbing Emiliano Buendía, scorer of Villa's winner in the final seconds of the match, Vidagany wrote: “Manage your expectations but never manage your dreams. 7 players in the box pushing in the last minute. That is the message and mentality of Unai.”

Look at the top three in the Premier League and similarities will strike you. All have Spanish managers closely aligned in their positional-play styles and they are the three clubs where the manager has the most power, where things are most built around their personality and vision.

The obstacles Villa have overcome, especially from the closing day of last season when they missed out on a Champions League place, makes their present surge remarkable and yet Emery's history makes it logical. Since taking tiny Lorca from mid-table in Spain's third tier to the brink of its top flight in his first 18 months as a coach, in his early thirties, he has been a super-achiever: four Europa League titles, victory in 11 of 15 finals contested, and the best win percentage of any Villa manager, any Paris Saint-Germain manager and any Villarreal manager.

At Villa they're in no doubt who the club's superstar is. The president of business operations, Francesco Calvo, told me when trying to compete on a budget dwarfed by rivals (Villa's £276million turnover is the eighth highest in the Premier League, almost £450million behind Manchester City) you need “shortcuts” and Villa's is Emery. “He's our real added value,” Calvo said.

Dean Smith, who took Villa up from the Championship in 2019 and built the foundations of the present team, was at Villa Park last weekend and revelled in Emery's skills. “You can just see how well coached Villa are with and without the ball,” Smith, now head coach of the Major League Soccer club Charlotte FC, said.

He highlighted how Emery used Youri Tielemans as a No10, pushing him alongside Ollie Watkins as Villa adopted a 4-4-2 pressing shape where Tielemans and Watkins would leave Arsenal's outside centre back on the ball to force him to come forward down that side — negating the influence of Declan Rice. And how Villa adjusted their own build-up to play through John McGinn, who was having more success at holding up the ball (“he just digs his arse in,” Smith said, laughing) than Watkins. These are the fine details with which Emery makes the difference.

The level of his coaching work is glimpsed when Villa push up for offside. Consistently during Emery's reign they have been the best team at catching opponents offside in the Premier League and the photographer Marc Atkins captured an extraordinary image of Villa's offside trap in 2023: players in a perfect line, in identical postures, side-on to the ball and pushing off in unison. It looks like ballet. You see training-ground drilling made art.

“Practice, practice, practice,” Emery told me when we sat down for his only UK newspaper one-on-one interview in 2023. “Build a mentality. Create a mentality. Be demanding every day.”

His journey with Villa began with a drive from Valencia to Madrid to have lunch at the house of the super-agent Jorge Mendes with the Villa co-owner, Nassef Sawiris, in October 2022. Accompanying him was Vidagany, a former semi-pro basketball player and journalist, who started working with Emery 17 years ago and plays an indispensable role in building Villa's training-ground culture and helping with communication.

Sawiris was battling gastroenteritis but felt a jolt of energy when Emery started speaking. There was no laptop show, no PowerPoint presentation, nor any of the other standard tricks of the modern coach. Emery, with that clenched passion of his, simply talked. “The difference between Manchester City and Manchester United isn't oil money — it's the people,” he said, laying out his vision for a successful club. Sawiris found himself handing Emery a blank sheet of paper. Map how you would redesign Villa, Sawiris said.

The anecdote is related in Guillem Balagué's brilliant new book on Emery, Rise of the Villans, which outlines how he set about transforming Villa's football and mindset after replacing Steven Gerrard. Emery disliked the long-balls, second-balls style under Gerrard and immediately introduced rondos in training where the objective was not (as customary) one and two-touch passing but taking multiple touches and retaining possession carefully. There was an emphasis on players' positioning on the pitch and on the smallest tactical details — backed up by Emery bringing ten coaches and analysts with him who, within days, installed six big analysis screens at Bodymoor Heath. “I didn't come here to waste my time, I've come here to win things,” Emery said when addressing players in the training-ground gym.

In that first half-season Villa leapt from 13th to seventh, qualifying for Europe. The next season they finished fourth and reached the Champions League. Last season brought an FA Cup semi-final, a Champions League quarter-final in which they pushed PSG all the way, and a league push that fell short in the most agonising way, when a Morgan Rogers goal was wrongly ruled out at 0-0 before Villa succumbed to defeat at Old Trafford in their final game.

Newcastle United pipped Villa for a Champions League spot on goal difference — and this had huge ramifications, the loss of revenue tipping Villa over Financial Fair Play limits and leading to Uefa controls on spending in the summer transfer window. That hit hard. Staff and players spoke about the system being rigged against clubs like theirs and Villa began 2025-26 in a seeming psychological malaise, going goalless in their first four games, which included defeats by Brentford, who also knocked them out of the Carabao Cup, and Crystal Palace.

Yet Emery never harked back to that pivotal refereeing error at Old Trafford, for which Villa received apologies from the official, Thomas Bramall, and Howard Webb, chief of the refereeing body Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL). Indeed, although PGMOL's Key Match Incident reports identified that Villa suffered more refereeing mistakes (nine) than any other top-flight club in 2024-25, Emery is never found moaning about decisions. To portray Villa as victims would go against his belief that a team's fate depends on its own hard work. “It's a no-excuses culture,” a confidant said.

On hard work, both Villa's recent turnaround and longer-term progress is built. Emery still does his own analysis, watching games four or five times and clipping and coding the video himself. “Preparing for a match feels almost spiritual, like a pilgrimage to Mecca,” he tells Balagué in Rise of the Villans. “People can criticise me all they want. But when it comes to analysis nobody beats me there.”

Before signing Marcus Rashford on loan from Manchester United last season, Emery met the player and was encouraged to find he was still a football-obsessed young kid at heart. He told Rashford to go away and do his research. “Find out how I train, how demanding I am, how many videos I show. If you still want to come after that, then you're my player,” he said.

His rebooting of Rashford encapsulated his ability to improve footballers, which is probably Emery's greatest power of all. He switches players on to details, like getting Watkins to arrange his feet like a sprinter's to improve acceleration, or educating Rogers in how to position himself in the “first square” — the key area between the opposition's centre backs and midfielders.

His net spend over three years is £36.5million, with five key starters still left over from the Smith era: McGinn, Watkins, Ezri Konsa, Emiliano Martínez and Matty Cash. A lifelong fan of the club, who stood on the Holte End, Smith understood what makes a Villa player — and it chimes with how Emery sees the game.
“At Villa, it's a big-club pressure, and big old stadium but a club that didn't challenge for a while — so mentality is a big thing,” Smith said.

“Konsa was playing for Charlton in League One when I signed him for Brentford [before taking the England defender to Villa], I first watched Ollie as Walsall manager when he was playing for Weston-super-Mare and I took Emi Martínez from Arsenal when he had won the FA Cup but there was no guarantee of him starting.
“They all had — and still have — a hunger and they're all coachable players who want to be educated and keep improving their games.”

Insiders say that an important element in the turnaround this season was announcing contract extensions for Cash, McGinn and Rogers in late October and early November. It felt like a further doubling down on the Emery project (though he hates that word), reinforcing its key ideas of commitment and continuity.

The uncertainty of the summer transfer window suddenly felt far away. Watkins had interested several clubs, City coveted Rogers, and Martínez spent deadline day at Bodymoor Heath waiting for a bid from Manchester United that never came. The morning after the window closed Vidagany made another of his memorable posts on X, using a picture of himself with unsung staff members who had worked round the clock on deadline day — the head of football administration, Sharon Barnhurst, and her No2, Daniel Mole, the director of legal, Victoria Wilkes, and the head of loans, Adam Henshall.

His message was that for Villa to thrive, despite rivals' resources and the spending controls, “mainly we need togetherness and unity. UTV. I love our Villa staff!!!” And that's where Villa — yes, title challengers — are drawing their power. From within. No side in Europe's top leagues has won more home games in the past three years, no Premier League team has dropped fewer points from winning positions this season, and opponents fall to bespoke tactics (Arsenal — attacking through the middle; Bournemouth — set pieces; City — a deeper block) sparked by Emery's analysis work.

Balagué's book reveals delightful details about Emery, like how he considered trademarking his famous Spanglish interview greeting of “Good ebening” and how his favourite book is Searching for and Maintaining Peaceby Father Jacques Philippe, a volume on Catholic spirituality.

He's such a fascinating character and Villa such welcome disruptors in a sport increasingly skewed towards the richest elite. “They're a top-six team. They're not going anywhere, they're that well coached, John McGinn's not going to lose his motivation, Ezri Konza's not going to drop in class, Ollie Watkins is still going to get you 15 goals in the season,” Smith said.

The title? “Well, every team can get hurt by injuries and other clubs have more squad power, and we know as coaches things can change quickly, so let's look at it when there are ten games to go. “That's with my manager's head on. With my Villa fan's head? Listen, I'd love it if they're still there with ten games left. I'll definitely be flying back.”

[Baldy]

Thanks jwarry, a great read.

Unai's success is all in the detail.