Unai Emery Has Turned Aston Villa Into The Premier League Team Of 2023 this summer!
This week, Unai Emery’s Aston Villa team not only defeated Manchester City, but also completely outplayed them, denying the Premier League winners any opportunity beyond the eleventh minute.
While Villa had 22 shots compared to Manchester City’s two, the final score was 1-0.
That is supposedly the joint-fewest shots created and the joint-most shots faced by a
Pep Guardiola squad in any league game when he was at Manchester City, Barcelona, or Bayern Munich.
Aston Villa’s win also put the Claret and Blues above Manchester City in the Premier League.
While only 15 games have been played so far this season, Villa’s good form stems all the way back to
Emery’s appointment on 24 October 2022.
After winning 23 of the 37 games they have played so far in 2023, Aston Villa has the third-best record in the Premier League. Man City is the only team with more victories.
In contrast, Villa, primarily under Steven Gerrard, finished with the 12th-best record in the league in 2022.
They only managed two victories in the two games that Emery oversaw prior to the World Cup break in 2022, out of their total of 11 wins.
Emery achieved that remarkable turnaround with basically the same players as Gerrard.
Only two players in the starting eleven against Manchester City – Pau Torres and Youri Tielemans – were not at the club when Gerrard lost his job.
The three Villa players with the most minutes this season – Ezri Konsa, John McGinn and Douglas Luiz have all been at the club since the 2019/20 season.
He’s generally used a 4-4-2 system out of possession and has Villa attack quickly with one full back pushing forward along with the wide midfielders. This has seen Villa score the joint-second most goals in the league, but they’ve also conceded more than the other top sides with opponents exploiting their high offside trap.
Emery’s success in the West Midlands has gone under the radar a little bit, with the initial success last season seen by some as a new manager bounce, but with more than one year in the Villa dugout now, it is clear that Aston Villa’s success is not just a short burst of form.
It also shows how an elite head coach – Emery has won the Europa League four times and coached Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain – can take a mid-table Premier League side to the next level when the players buy into the coach’s tactics.
As the season progresses, it will get more difficult to remain in the top four.
Apart from Tyrone Mings and Emiliano Buendia’s injuries, Villa has a fairly stable squad thus far this season.
However, an injury crisis could ruin their campaign, and even though they won’t be directly impacted by the Asian Cup or the Africa Cup of Nations this winter, they still have their first Europa Conference
League campaign, which could make matters more difficult.
Supporters of Villa will recall how their 2008–09 season collapsed following their UEFA Cup loss to CSKA Moscow.
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