Unai Emery is the coach of YB’s opponent Aston Villa

Unai Emery is considered “Mr. Europa League”. No other coach has won this European football trophy more often than the Basque. He won it three times with FC Sevilla and once with FC Villarreal. The Europa League, which exudes less glamour than the premium competition Champions League, seems to be tailor-made for Emery. His teams always define themselves through discipline and team spirit. Emery’s performance in the Champions League is therefore less impressive; he only made it to the semi-finals once, otherwise he was eliminated in the round of 16 at the latest.

Emery’s next attempt this season is as coach of the ambitious Premier League club Aston Villa. On Tuesday, at 6:45 p.m., the European Cup campaign starts away against Young Boys. Participation in the Champions League is a coup for Emery: For the first time in history, Aston Villa, one of the many clubs from the Birmingham metropolitan area, the second largest city in England, has qualified for the most important European club competition.

The championship on the island is often a triangular match between the clubs from London, Liverpool and Manchester. The dominance of these cities is a reflection of the economic situation. In the past 19 seasons, only three clubs managed to break into the phalanx of the so-called top six – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham – and finish a season in the top four places in the table: the sensational champions Leicester City in 2016, Newcastle United, which is supported by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, in 2023 – and now Emery’s Aston Villa.

Aston Villa invests more than ever in transfers

The last time the club experienced such special days was 43 years ago, when it won the championship for the last time in the 1980/81 season. The founding member of the Football League and the Premier League, whose basic league concepts also went back to Villa director William McGregor in the 19th century, emerged from the affair with honor. But after increasingly wealthy foreign investors bought into top teams in the 2000s, Villa lost touch.

US businessman Randy Lerner, who bought the workers’ club for £62 million in 2006, managed the dubious feat of selling it a decade later at a huge loss, despite constant financial subsidies and the booming league. He was followed in 2018 – after a brief episode by Chinese Tony Xia – by billionaires Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris, a brother of Samih Sawiris, who is known in Switzerland as an investor in tourism projects.

Aston Villa’s owners represent a growing trend of more and more clubs acquiring extremely wealthy owners, thereby creating a level playing field. Since joining, Sawiris and Edens have consistently invested around £100 million in transfer fees on new players each season, and before this season they even invested £150 million – more than ever before.

The environment at Aston Villa is quieter than that in London or Paris

The team is made up predominantly of players who either want to make the jump to a top club or whose potential has been underestimated by such clubs. The Argentine World Cup goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez, for example, was under contract with Arsenal for ten years. The London club loaned him out for most of that time and then sold the now 32-year-old to Villa for £20 million in 2020, a costly misjudgment. To a certain extent, this also applies to the coach Emery.

He was sacked after a short time at Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal, but looking back, it was clearly less due to his coaching than to the clubs’ mismanagement. The Arsenal crowd, who sometimes behaved in an arrogant manner, seemed to be annoyed with him in the end, and the expression “good evening” that he often used instead of “good evening” became synonymous with his heavily accented English. Aston Villa, which is generally quieter and less in the public eye, suits Emery’s way of working, and is similar to the environment at his previous clubs in Seville and Villarreal.

Emery took over Villa in November 2022, just before the relegation zone, and led the team to seventh place in the same season, which qualified them for the Conference League. For the first time in thirteen years, the club was represented internationally again. In order to strengthen the squad, sporting director Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo, known as Monchi, was brought in in 2023. Emery and Monchi once worked together successfully in Seville. Similar to Manchester City, where coach Josep Guardiola is surrounded by companions in management, Monchi also has Emery’s back as a confidant. Together they managed to qualify for the Champions League.

Now it’s all about Emery convincingly performing in the premier class – to perhaps rise from “Mr. Europa League” to “Mr. Champions League”.