A year under Emery: How he’s transformed Aston Villa

This week marks the first anniversary of Unai Emery’s appointment as Aston Villa head coach. Year one has gone rather well.

On 24 October 2022, Villa were just outside the bottom three with 12 points from 12 matches, adrift and aimless after a disappointing year under Steven Gerrard.

Emery promptly won his first match in charge, 3-1 at home to Manchester United, and thus began a stunning rise that 12 months later shows no sign of tapering off.

In 2023 only Manchester City have won more than Villa’s 62 points from 31 matches, and counting all Premier League encounters since Emery’s official first day this time last year, Villa are fourth in the table.

It’s no surprise their supporters are beginning to talk about UEFA Champions League qualification. After a thumping 4-1 victory over West Ham United on Sunday, even neutrals are beginning to wonder. Emery certainly is.

“We want to be in the top five,” he told Sky Sports prior to Sunday’s match, a position that this season will likely be rewarded with a Champions League spot.

See: What’s new in 2023/24: Extra Champions League place

 “Dream, always,” was his message after the final whistle. Villa fans don’t need telling. They have just witnessed 11 consecutive Premier League wins at Villa Park – and know they are watching the best Villa team this century.

Bailey's super strike v West Ham

Emery’s flexibility & world-class analysis

The reason Emery still doesn’t get quite enough praise is that he is hard to pin down. Defining his style with neat tactical buzzwords is difficult, such is the flexibility of his approach.

The sense that Villa’s core values slip through your fingers is, of course, a deliberate strategy to confuse and confound the opposition. He implements a structure that is highly flexible in order to provide space for detailed instruction on the opponent. Emery is a fastidious studier of the other team, famously poring dozens of hours into analysis to find the slightest flaw.

“The manager spoke before the game and gave us a game plan, and it’s crazy because whatever the manager says, he knows how the game is going to go before,” Matty Cash said after the 5-2 victory at Burnley in August. “He does that all the time – he’s incredible.”

The advantage is twofold - if Villa's players follow his instructions they will not only outsmart the other team but, having changed their own set-up, they will also be indecipherable to their opponent.

Villa’s unknowable and unassuming presence is such that even Opta cannot quite reveal who they really are. It’s almost comical that Opta’s graph of Premier League playing styles has Villa exactly in the middle, hidden and intangible.

This is the secret to Emery’s success - world-class preparation and the construction of a team that hangs on his every word. But in order to implement the plan, the foundations must become muscle memory.

Douglas Luiz & Kamara's critical contribution

One thing particularly noticeable when watching Villa are the automatisms. These are the passing moves drilled so often in training that they become instinctive, minimising the need to improvise, and therefore minimising mistakes.

This underpins everything Villa do. Douglas Luiz and Boubacar Kamara are the linchpins, their immaculate technique under pressure – coupled with the progressive passing of Pau Torres, in particular – ensures that even when Emery switches up the formation, underneath it all is a calm sense of control.

Douglas Luiz's opener v West Ham

This is borne out in the numbers. Among Premier League teams this season, Villa have made one error leading to an opposition shot, the fewest in the competition. They also sit bottom of the table for the number of defensive actions their opponents have made that lead to a shot attempt, with one, while they have allowed the fewest opposition tackles in their own third.

Villa do not make mistakes or give the ball away cheaply, despite almost always playing out from the back. Indeed, only goalkeepers at Arsenal, Brighton, Chelsea and Liverpool have a shorter average pass length than the 27.4 yards of Emiliano Martinez.

And there is a very good reason why Emery’s Villa consistently look to pass their way out of trouble.

Press-baiting & box midfield define "Emery Way"

If there is an "Emery Way", then it can broadly be defined as creating artificial transitions. These are plays that give the illusion of a counter-attack, in terms of the number of bodies racing at speed into the final third, but that actually come from their own build-up out of defence.

Artificial transitions are increasingly common in elite football, and although they have been around for a while - Antonio Conte is a great exponent - the idea has been popularised more recently by Roberto De Zerbi and his "press-baiting".

Like at Brighton & Hove Albion, Emery’s centre-backs can often be found stood still with their foot on top of the ball – waiting to be pressed so they can quickly fire a forward pass through the lines. It is all about anticipating the right moment to shift through the gears, snap into action after some sideways possession, and hit vertically into opposition territory.

Emery's first year at Villa

At Villa, this is almost always achieved with the use of two No 10s occupying the half-spaces to create a box-shaped central midfield.

In fact, no matter what formation Emery selects, when Villa have the ball you will almost always find the box, a structure that provides vertical passes to slice teams open and create fake transitions – which is why they lead the way with 29 direct attacks in the Premier League this season.

The move for Douglas Luiz’s opener on Sunday is a classic example. Villa calmly had possession at the back, but one excellent pass from Pau Torres fired through the middle caught out the West Ham midfield.

Notice the positions of John McGinn and Nicolo Zaniolo, supposedly Villa’s wide men in a 4-4-2, and how James Ward-Prowse is too distracted to notice Moussa Diaby.

Split strikers, cutbacks & overlapping full-backs

Villa’s box midfield, press-baiting passing, and fast transitions are undoubtedly the hallmarks of an Emery side – and remind us of the explosive Sevilla and Villarreal teams with whom he won the UEFA Europa League with.

But again, it would be naive to suggest Emery’s tactics can be boiled down to overarching principles. There are many different strings to the bow, from sitting deep and deploying back sixes (as at Chelsea and Wolverhampton Wanderers this season) to dominating possession with flying full-backs (versus Crystal Palace and Everton).

Nevertheless, some common themes of Villa’s play include cutbacks to midfielders on the edge of the box, which tend to follow wider attacks in which Villa’s strikers split to receive balls into the channels.

This is where McGinn, reborn under Emery, comes into his own, clipping through balls into Diaby and Ollie Watkins, as he did for the all-important third goal against West Ham at the weekend. Note again how McGinn and Zaniolo have come into the middle.

Villa’s full-backs are arguably the most malleable members of the team. Sometimes one sits to form a back three, but often Cash and Lucas Digne are given licence to overlap in a traditional manner and whip crosses into the box.

Villa rank sixth in the Premier League for attempted crosses with 158, although only Luton Town have successfully completed more crosses into the penalty area than Villa, with 21.

High line without high pressing

How Villa defend is no less changeable in many respects, but there is a fair amount of consistency here compared to their positional play when in possession.

Villa’s risky defensive line is well documented. They have caught 36 offsides already this season, which is almost 50 per cent more than even the second-best Premier League team (Fulham, with 26), yet it doesn’t always work. Only Luton have had more successful through-balls against them than Villa’s total of 27.

It should be said that Emery’s defence very often gets it right, hence why Villa have faced only 101 shots this season, the third fewest in the division.

When it does go wrong, it’s because Emery does something unusual. Villa do not complement their high line with a high press, traditionally understood to be necessary to prevent opponents from having time to pick a pass into all that open space.

Instead, they sit in a compressed mid-block, rarely hounding down the ball. They have the fifth lowest Passes Allowed Per Defensive Action (PPDA) in the division (14.7), have made the fewest tackles in the final third (13) and only Sheffield United and West Ham have had fewer high turnovers than Villa’s 56.

Liverpool and Newcastle United, in 3-0 and 5-1 wins respectively, were able to take advantage of that absence of pressure mixed with a dangerous offside trap.

Liverpool’s second goal, made by Trent Alexander-Arnold’s ball over the top for Mohamed Salah, illustrates the problem of rarely closing down:

Villa can qualify for the Champions League

Perhaps, as opponents facing a shape-shifting Villa look for something to cling onto, more managers will look to exploit this defensive issue.

Certainly those big losses show that tactical preparation as fine-tuned, as high-risk and as obsessive as Emery’s risks occasionally going spectacularly wrong, something McGinn alluded to after Villa’s 6-1 victory over Brighton.

“I was thinking this morning when the manager did the tactics meeting that it's either going to be 6-1 to us or 6-1 to them,” he said.

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But these are minor complaints, and based on how the last 365 days have gone, it would be wise to assume Emery will work out how to make their offside trap even more secure.

Frankly there is no reason to doubt him on anything. It has been a near-perfect first year in charge - and Villa keep getting better and better.

The UEFA Europa Conference League will no doubt take its toll as the season goes on. But with Manchester United and Chelsea struggling for form, and fifth place likely to be enough to qualify for the Champions League, Villa supporters should follow Emery’s advice – and start dreaming.