Can Unai Emery and Aston Villa win Premier League title?

It was the perfect moment. There is no better way to win a football match than with the last kick of the game, playing towards your own home fans, and following an endless goalmouth scramble. The added context of Aston Villa moving to within three points of their opponents, the league leaders, takes it up a notch.

The final flourish comes from viewing the goal as a culmination of a three-year project under Unai Emery; as a symbol of all that is good about this bold, front-foot Villa side who look ready to win major honours.

A lot of fans are starting to get carried away – as they should. What is football for if not escapism, if not to choose optimism and indulge in the possibilities of a future not yet ruined by cold, brutal reality?

Villa are not in the title race, not yet. But they have earned the right to have the proposition seriously considered, especially after a month that has seen Arsenal win just eight points from five Premier League matches, Manchester City leak goals, and Chelsea drop away entirely. The prospect of a low points tally for the champion - something close to Leicester City’s 81 in 2015/16 – opens the door to Villa.

An awful lot would have to go in Villa’s favour to pull off the minor miracle, most importantly Arsenal spluttering badly through winter and Man City failing to improve on their autumn results. In reality, Mikel Arteta’s side have looked confident and resilient even through patchy results while Man City almost always accelerate after Christmas.

Focusing solely on what Villa have to do, a more hopeful picture develops, counterintuitively because of the fact Emery’s side are over-performing their underlying numbers and have often struggled to maximise the abilities of their best players this season.

Only now are Villa starting to look like a team entering their peak. The performances against Arsenal and Brighton had the confidence, tactical dexterity, and individual magic from Morgan Rogers and Ollie Watkins that simply haven’t been present up to that point.

We know from previous seasons that Villa under Emery can reach and sustain high levels of performance. It is in their favour, then, that they are only just reaching that point; that they have somehow stumbled through a bad patch of form while winning most of their games.

Opta’s ‘expected points’ table, which uses ‘expected goals’ figures to determine the outcome of matches, has Aston Villa all the way down in 16th, suggesting Villa ‘should’ have 16.7 points, almost half their actual total of 30.

Prior to the 4-3 win at Brighton last week nine of Villa’s 16 Premier League goals this season had been scored from outside the box, an unsustainable figure reflecting Rogers’ ghostly form and Watkins’ dry spell (two goals in 19 games in all competitions).

Emery’s best players were not performing, and although Villa were playing better than in the slow and directionless games of August and September (when Villa won just two points from their first five games), not much had actually shifted aside from Pau Torres’s restoration to the team, which tightened up the defence and gave Villa line-breaking passes to end the worst of the flat football.

That changed at Brighton. Rogers, quietly building form, was back to his best and Watkins’ brace signalled a sudden return of his confidence. The win against Arsenal confirmed it, and signalled that Villa – after a below-par first third of the campaign – are now ready to play at their best.

The fact that they are just three points off top at the beginning of that process is remarkable. Very few clubs ever win 12 out of 14 matches in a sequence. Nobody, before Villa, has done it without even playing very well.

For the moon shot at the title, Villa will need to navigate a tricky Christmas period that includes a home game against Man Utd (the one team Villa just never, ever beat, even when a Champions League spot is on the line) and trips to Stamford Bridge and the Etihad.

Then, they will need to strengthen considerably in January. That means terminating the Harvey Elliott loan and re-spending that would-have-been-obligated £35 million on a quick, dribbling winger who can inject much needed width and pace into the team. It also means signing a right-back to provide competition to Matty Cash and a number ten to replace the Elliott/Marco Asensio gap and keep things fresh for the second half of the campaign.

Even with all of that, the obstacles are many. Europa League participation will only become more strenuous in 2026. There is a creeping sense that Emery’s tactical foundations are becoming predictable, partly explaining the sluggish performances in autumn. Then there’s the simple fact Arsenal and Man City have vastly greater resources, talent, and experience.

But stranger things have happened – and not that long ago. It would not take anything like as big a miracle as Leicester’s.

Villa are targeting Champions League qualification this season but it can only help the cause to look beyond that. One game at a time, who knows, Emery’s Villa could pull it off.

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