Can Aston Villa win the title? How Unai Emery awoke sleeping giants
For more than 30 years Aston Villa have been described as a ‘sleeping giants’, a phrase uttered mostly for its pleasing rhythm but also because it allows pundits to mask condescension as praise.
Lovely Aston Villa with their lovely old stadium: people like talking wistfully about Villa because the club is so wholesomely unthreatening.
Ex-pros often say they loved Villa Park for its grandeur. No, they loved Villa Park because they never feared going there.
Anyone with enough time to gaze slack-jawed at the architecture isn’t sufficiently intimidated. It made Villa cosy and likeable, a perfect fit for the phrase that implies inertia. Nobody actually expects the giant to wake up.
Well, they have.
No stopping now
The closer you look at Aston Villa’s rise towards the summit of the Premier League table the more they look like legitimate challengers.
The more you start to think that only the name, only the 40-year coma, gets in the way of believing Villa are here to stay.
Villa have been performing at their current level for over a year now, winning 87 points from Unai Emery’s 42 games in charge and 81 this calendar year, which is second only to Manchester City.
They have an exceptionally talented team, with a spine of potential £100m players in Emi Martinez, Ezri Konsa, John McGinn, Douglas Luiz and Ollie Watkins. They have a stronger bench than perhaps any of their title rivals.
Tactical genius
Better yet Emery, Champions League semi-finalist with Villarreal in 2021/22, is world-class at adapting his tactical approach and team selection: the 1-0 mauling of Man City, the defensive grind of the 1-0 win over Arsenal, and the bullish 2-1 comeback victory at Brentford were all completely different in tone and intent.
This is the secret weapon that underpins Villa’s rise. Emery spends 12-15 hours a day at Bodymoor Heath scouting opponents and drilling his players in infamously-long video analysis meetings. His tactical preparation is unrivalled and it shows.
The constant tinkering - before and during matches – makes Villa impossible to read and, therefore, clears their path to continue in this way, one game and one battle plan at a time.
But beneath all the tweaking is a solid tactical foundation that gives Villa some guiding principles, as well as the illusion of predictability for upcoming opponents.
They almost always start in a 4-2-2-2 formation. They always deploy an aggressive offside trap. They always try to bait the opposition press before enacting straight-line automatisms to move quickly into the final third. But knowledge of Villa’s basic structure gets you nowhere.
That’s because Emery’s Villa are easily the most tactically complex team in the Premier League, his opening strategy and inevitable hour-mark shake-ups producing endless content for the keen watchers and tactical bloggers among us.
Still, that doesn’t entirely explain how Aston Villa have got to this position or why the players and coaches seem symbiotically attached.
For that we should look to the unprecedented power given to Emery by Villa’s owners Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens.
Emery has total control
It has led to the Spaniard personally handpicking the two people directly above him, Villa’s president of football operations and their director of football.
The former is his long-time confidante Monchi. The latter, Damian Vidagany, originally came to Villa as Emery’s personal assistant.
Between them Emery, Monchi, and Vidagany oversee the running of virtually every department.
It is extremely uncommon for a modern club to give the manager total control and of course it opens Villa up to a Wenger or Ferguson-like collapse whenever Emery eventually leaves, but for now it is pretty obvious he can be trusted.
And nothing says trust like a “collaborative partnership” sought with third-tier Spanish club Real Union – ostensibly to share Villa’s state-of-the-art technical, coaching, performance and data methodologies – just because Emery is the controlling owner.
Emery’s stamp is everywhere you look. He’ll be buying Villa shares next.
It certainly feels like every person is pulling in the same direction, which is a lot easier when essentially one man is doing all the pulling, and nowhere is Emery’s influence more beneficial than in the transfer market, where Villa seem immune from bad luck or bad decisions over the last year.
Superb transfer policy
Moussa Diaby, Pau Torres, Youri Tielemans and Alex Moreno have been superb signings, while sales of Cameron Archer, Carney Chukwuemeka, and Jack Grealish (prior to Emery’s arrival) have ensured Villa’s yearly net spend in the five seasons since promotion averages out at just £60m.
There is no looming Financial Fair Play problem, and no need to cut spending or curb progress.
And so there is no reason to deter Villa’s optimism. It has been a perfect 13 months with Emery at the helm and indeed statistically the best calendar year in their entire history thanks to a club-record 25 wins in 2023.
Surveying the evidence we can assume 2024 will be just as successful and this giant will still be wide awake come May.
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