We’re absolutely positive it can’t feel this way to Aston Villa fans, but for those of us with a more passing interest in the club… it feels weird that they were a Championship club in 2019, doesn’t it? Almost forgotten like someone else’s bad dream.
Villa’s ascent from there to where they are now has been gradual enough almost to be taken for granted, and yet swift enough to be remarkable. It took them three years in the bottom half of the Premier League before – under the guidance of Unai Emery, who joined the club on November 1 2022 – becoming part of the firmament of the top half of the table.
Even Villa fans can be caught off guard by it, a bit. They had got so used to being an overall decent side with a handful of star players – Jack Grealish being the ace, the king, the joker and, well, the jack all at the same time – that it now takes them a moment to realise that when they start listing the players who make Villa work, they are now forced to name virtually everyone in the squad.
Aston Villa’s rise makes a mockery of Premier League’s work-in-progress clubs
Grealish’s place in the all-time ranking of Villa players is hotly debated among the Villa faithful, but some will vehemently argue that he is one of the best players they have had in decades. Now, if you offered him back from Manchester City, it would feel like a gamble.
Tyrone Mings had long been the big, smiling rock in the Villa defence; he has now been out of action for over a year with an ACL injury, and they enjoyed their best season in 27 years without him. You could say much the same about previous key playmaker Emi Buendia, come to that.
That’s not intended as a knock on any of those players, but rather a reflection of what has happened over the past couple of years. Bolstered by excellent recruitment, Emery has done an incredible job of making his team into a team.
There is indisputably individual talent in that side. Jhon Duran hogs the headlines and the social media attention this season, but there’s Ollie Watkins, perpetually in double figures in the goals tally and halfway there already this season.
Morgan Rogers has hit the Premier League running since joining from Middlesbrough, while Youri Tielemans and Lucas Digne, two standout players at their former Premier League clubs, now happily sharing the spotlight.
There’s Emi Martinez, the eccentric World Cup winning goalkeeper who ranks among the best in the world. And then there’s the straightforwardly honest grafters: Pau Torres, John McGinn, Matty Cash. Everywhere you look in the Villa squad, there is personality.
It took a bit of trial and error on Villa’s part, and there were missteps along the way: the Phillipe Coutinho experiment never worked. But Emery, himself with a point to prove after his butt-of-the-joke spell at Arsenal, has taken a group that instinctively feels like it shouldn’t work – that feels like it still ought to look disconnected and at odds with itself – and made it work.
Villa sit top of the Champions League league phase with a 100% record. They are, once more, fourth in the Premier League, level on points and results with much-fancied Arsenal.
Let’s not kid ourselves about the level of investment that has gone into Villa: it’s been loads. But where Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester United and Newcastle have all felt like works in progress moving forwards and then backwards for at least a couple of years – significantly more, in some cases – Villa currently feel as though they have broken through one glass ceiling and are already rocketing towards the next.
It’s still early days in the season, but that makes you wonder just how far they can actually rise. A Premier League title challenge still feels fanciful, a run deep into the Champions League knockout stages does not feel out of the question.
Unlike Newcastle last year, Villa are already used to the demands of balancing continental football with domestic priorities after reaching the Conference League semi-finals last year – not to mention that Emery is a four-time Europa League winner with Sevilla and Villarreal.
Perhaps that impression is misguided. Plenty of sides have been in Villa’s position before – including Villa themselves, several times – only to run out of rocket fuel and loop hopelessly back the other way.
But at the moment, it’s a brilliantly exciting time for Villa, the likes of which they haven’t known for a generation or more. They’ll be hoping to hold onto that feeling a good while longer.
