Unai Emery has to convince Villa all over again that the future can be theirs

This one was different: less granular, more punchy, somewhere between a mission statement and a cri de coeur. Emery wanted to make sure everyone at Villa knew his vision. “The 1980s belonged to Liverpool,” he told the assembled crowd. “The 1990s to Manchester United. The 2000s to United and Chelsea. The 2010s and 2020s to Manchester City.” He was convinced, he said, that the 2030s would belong to Aston Villa.

That proclamation – recounted in Rise of the Villans, the journalist Guillem Balagué’s account of Emery’s three years in Birmingham – seems ambitious in hindsight. In truth, it probably sounded a bit of a stretch at the time. But it is entirely consistent with how Villa felt then, how the club have felt for much of Emery’s tenure: optimistic, confident, as though anything might be possible as long as he was there.

Emery had already transformed the club once. He had arrived in Birmingham with free rein to shape the club in his image. Balagué recounts the story of Nassef Sawiris, Villa’s co-owner, meeting Emery at the home of the super-agent Jorge Mendes and handing him a “blank piece of paper”. He said: “Draw the club you need to succeed, not just the team, but everything. What do you need to make Aston Villa winners?” Sawiris was not offering Emery a “project”, Balagué writes. “He wanted Unai to design one.”

The approach had worked. Villa were circling relegation when Emery was appointed; by the end of the season, they had qualified for Europe. Just before he gave that rousing call to arms, that promise of a golden future, the Basque was rewarded with a five-year contract. The following season, he restored Aston Villa to Europe’s top table for the first time in four decades.

Time functions strangely in football. It is only a year, this week, since Villa’s first home game in the Champions League, a delirious 1-0 win against – it’s a funny old game – Bayern Munich, the team Villa had beaten in 1982 to lift the European Cup, the greatest night in the club’s history. And yet the ebullience of that night, that team, that first hopeful iteration of Emery’s Villa already seems to belong to a dim and distant past.

The opening weeks of this season have swept the first real shadows into Emery’s hitherto cloudless sky. Villa have yet to win a Premier League game. They have secured just one point and, more remarkably still, scored only one league goal.

After the draw with Sunderland which brought both of those milestones, Emery not only admitted that his team were struggling for “confidence” and “personality”, but suggested they had been guilty of being “lazy”.

There has been more. Emiliano Martínez, the goalkeeper, spent most of the summer trying to leave. Monchi, the renowned dealmaker brought in as president of football operations with Emery’s blessing, left his post this week. The harmony, the sense of unified purpose that has characterised so much of Emery’s time at Villa, seems to have crumbled all at once.

The club know exactly who – or, more precisely, what – is to blame for that. Unusually, it is not the manager. The extent to which Villa has become Emery’s club, as Sawiris promised it would, is difficult to exaggerate. It is significant that Monchi’s replacement is Roberto Olabe, the former Real Sociedad sporting director and another figure familiar to Emery. (He is from the other side of the Basque Country.)

Damian Vidagany, the club’s director of football operations, is Emery’s longstanding confidant and adviser. Balagué notes that, when Emery first came to Villa, he had a staff of 10 coaches and assistants and analysts. That has now expanded so much that it has, he writes, doubled in size in the space of three years.

Villa, though, remain absolutely convinced that placing the club’s fate almost entirely in Emery’s hands is the right decision. The problem, as they see it, is the Premier League’s hated financial rules, seen in at least half of Birmingham as designed almost explicitly to stop Villa fulfilling their potential.

Both the fans and Villa’s C-suite are adamant that they are being held back by limitations on what their owners can invest, by the need to balance the books. The iniquity of the profit and sustainability rules is now pretty much the club’s official line. Emery has written about it in his programme notes. Players, including Ezri Konsa and John McGinn, have asserted that it is “killing” the ambition of Villa and teams like them.

That position may or may not be correct. It is certainly possible to argue that Villa have been held back, at least in the past year or two, rather more by a failure to spend money well than a failure to spend money at all. Whether it is relevant to Villa’s current plight, though, is another matter.

Every single player who started in Villa’s draw at Sunderland, for example, is a full international. Emery still has an attack spearheaded by Morgan Rogers and Ollie Watkins, both of whom were included – along with Ezri Konsa – in Thomas Tuchel’s most recent England squad. It is not unreasonable to suggest that a team of that quality, bolstered by the summer arrivals of Harvey Elliott, Jadon Sancho and Evann Guessand, should be able to score more than one goal in five league games.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that at least some of that underperformance is connected to the club’s ongoing financial gripes, as though the players have in some way internalised the idea that they cannot be expected to compete.

Emery’s Villa once seemed full of ambition. It does not feel like that any more. The club, now, project a sort of fatalism, as though their complaints have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Emery has convinced Villa that the future can be theirs once before. His task now, at a club designed to his exact specifications, is to do it again.

Photograph by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images