When Unai Emery was sacked by Arsenal after 18 months, his reputation as a Premier League manager was seemingly in tatters. Now he is attempting to lead Aston Villa to a top-four finish for the first time in 28 years. Victory at the Emirates on Sunday — to add to the 1-0 win at Villa Park against Arsenal in December — would aid that ambition and dent Arsenal’s title hopes. But what is he getting right now that he got wrong in north London?
A proper structure
The biggest and most important change for Emery, 52, is that he has power he never had at Arsenal and a structure that has been built around him. In addition to his backroom team he has brought in Monchi, 55, with whom he won three Europa League titles at Sevilla, as president of football operations and Damian Vidagany, who started out as Emery’s PR officer 15 years ago at Valencia, as director of football.
The three of them are always together, be it at the club’s Bodymoor Heath training ground, on the coach to a game, in a European press conference or pitchside before an away match. Vidagany in particular has been key to allowing Emery to focus only on the football. He acts as a link between the players and the manager, deals with agents and talks to others within the club.
At Arsenal Emery was stuck in the middle of power struggles and changing executives with whom he never had a close bond. He was reluctant to get involved in the wider politics and yet the structure was too chaotic to allow him to focus purely on coaching. That is in total contrast to his relationship with Wes Edens and Nassef Sawiris, the Villa owners, who have done everything to allow him to get on with his primary job.
Making a fast start
Whoever succeeded Arsène Wenger after the Frenchman’s 22 years was always going to be in for a challenge. After Arsenal finished sixth in Wenger’s final campaign, the expectation was that the new manager would immediately take the club back into their habitual position, the top four. It was a big task for a manager arriving in the league for the first time. Arsenal lost their first two games — against Manchester City and Chelsea — and finished the season in fifth.
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Let’s compare that with the situation at Villa: when he took charge in November 2022, the team were out of the bottom three only on goal difference; the fans were disillusioned with the way the team were underperforming and the lack of identity under Steven Gerrard. He won his first match 3-1 against Manchester United, which helped to immediately convince players and supporters. Any progress that season would have been a bonus; they finished seventh, qualifying for Europe.
Wider management experience
Part of the change is simply that he has more varied experience. He arrived at Arsenal having led Valencia to three consecutive Champions League qualifications and then won three consecutive Europa Leagues with Sevilla (as well as a spell at Paris Saint-Germain).
But since then he won the French league with PSG and failed at Arsenal — both of which involved managing players with bigger egos and profiles than he had experienced before — and then returned to Spain with Villarreal, where he won the Europa League again, helping him to regain his belief in his philosophy.
He accepted that the lessons he had learnt and all the experiences he had gone through had made him a better coach. When he arrived back in England he was more confident and better equipped to succeed. He turned down Newcastle United to stick with Villarreal, but when Villa offered him the job he knew it was the right opportunity.
Clearer playing style
At Arsenal there were questions about what exactly Emery wanted his side to be and what they were trying to do. He had a vision for how he wanted his team to play but struggled to convert that into performances. There were flashes of high-intensity football but not to the degree that has been seen at Villa Park. There was a feeling that he was too reactive to opposition tactics instead of focusing on his own ideology. He tweaked the team too often, using different players, formations and ideas, which meant there was little consistency. He asked his main strikers, Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, to play in different ways: the former was asked to create and finish while the latter was expected to stretch the game while functioning as a goalscorer too. In short he was asking for too much.
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Compare that with the evolution of Ollie Watkins. Under Gerrard the England forward was asked to link play deep infield and help to create overloads; Emery, however, wants him in the box as much as possible and running in behind the defence. That simplification of Watkins’s role has contributed to his best goalscoring season (18 goals, behind only Erling Haaland). Watkins takes a much larger share of touches in the penalty area under Emery (20 per cent) than Lacazette (16) and Aubameyang (12) did under the manager at Arsenal.
Emery was seen as a pragmatic, safety-first coach but the high line he plays at Villa has resulted in him moving away from that approach. Villa’s offside line is, on average, almost eight metres higher up the pitch than Arsenal’s under Emery.
Keeping the players on side
The squad he inherited at Arsenal felt more fractured than the one he took over at Villa. Emery admitted after leaving Arsenal that some players were finding it difficult to accept they were no longer important and his decision to change the captain four times affected the dynamic. Mesut Özil became a problem and Emery did not appear to have the ability to sort out those relationships. His long analysis sessions, which started off as positives, became arduous for his Arsenal squad.
But perhaps because of the immediate upturn in results when he took over at Villa Park, the players have been quick to buy into his methods and realised he could improve them as players. John McGinn has joked affectionately about the length of the analysis sessions. Tyrone Mings, the centre back, put it starkly: “He basically taught me that I know nothing about the position that I play.”
Every member of the squad is buying into his methods and it is no coincidence that at least three of his starting XI — Watkins, Douglas Luiz and Leon Bailey — are having their best campaigns in a Villa shirt.
Language
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His level of English was cited as a problem by some Arsenal players and was widely mocked on social media. But he kept working on his language skills after leaving, and there has been no criticism at Villa Park, partly because of that improvement and partly because the squad can see the progress his methods are bringing.
Arsenal v Aston Villa
Premier League
Sunday, kick-off 4.30pm
TV: Sky Sports Main Event
