Key Highlights
- Villa had won only two of their first 11 games of the season and lay 17th in the Premier League table.
- Unai Emery was appointed as manager 12 days later, since when the transformation in Villa has been remarkable.
- In his three years in charge, no side in the top five leagues in Europe have won more home games and Villa have finished seventh, fourth and sixth, while reaching the quarter-final of the Champions League. It’s not just Emery, of course: significant money has been spent as well – £35m that January, £100m the following season, nearly £200m the season after that.
- It’s only fair to point out that significant sales have been made, so the net spend since Emery took over is only around £40m, but there has also been a significant increase in salaries, with the latest available financial results showing Villa had the seventh highest wage bill in the Premier League – although that does not include Marcus Rashford, Marco Asensio and Axel Disasi, who were signed on loan in January in an effort to ensure Champions League qualification. Emery, at least to a non-Spanish audience, had always seemed a slightly unfortunate manager, not helped by his resemblance to the manager of the Bureau de Change played by Steve Coogan in The Day Today’s spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary.
- He was clearly gifted, as his record in the Europa League showed, but he kept on taking the wrong job: Spartak Moscow when they were a basket case; Paris Saint-Germain when Neymar was still the boy-king, so he was reduced to cutting the cake during the Brazilian’s three-day birthday celebrations; Arsenal straight after Arsène Wenger.
