In April, Aston Villa beat Paris Saint-Germain at Villa Park and the eventual European champions called it their hardest tie of the competition. Less than six months later, Villa are in the Premier League’s bottom three and winless.
After Sunday’s 1-1 draw at 10-man Sunderland, Unai Emery accused his players of being lazy and admitted that his Villa team are lacking an identity.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion that a glorious cycle is coming to an end. We analyse six reasons for the unpleasant funk…
Creeping sense of ennui
On the final day of last season, Aston Villa lost 2-0 to a Manchester United side that hadn’t won a league fixture in two-and-a-half months. A draw would have been enough for Champions League football, and as such it created an inescapable sense of missed opportunity. At full-time, Emery looked a little haunted.
That has hung around Villa and their training ground ever since. The mood was low and has not improved. Put simply, Emery’s team looks like a group of young men who are feeling sorry for themselves and cannot work out how to shake away the sense that a mini-era is ending.
But that’s not good enough. Crystal Palace had their Europa League adventure ruined by poor administration and overzealous punishments – they are fifth in the league and unbeaten. Bournemouth lost almost their entire defence and look better now than they did last season. Bad things happen to football teams; it is your response to adversity and setback that defines your reputation.
Summer plans blocked by limitations
In January, Villa gambled high wages on Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio in an attempt to make the Champions League. They improved the team but it wasn’t quite enough.
That did feel like the last transfer window hurrah for a while, for everyone inside the club knew that this summer would have to be understated. Villa are operating within Uefa’s squad cost control agreements after breaking wage-revenue ratio regulations. The sale of the women’s team, very useful for coming under financial limits, cannot be included in Uefa’s own calculations.
This is reason to feel pretty glum because English (and European) football’s establishment is being reinforced. The elite don’t mind you succeeding, they just ensure that each success exists within its own bubble. You don’t get off years without starting again at nought, because you are not financially insured against them. You have to be better than ever to go again because it’s so hard to be bigger.
Villa signed one first-team player for a fee this summer, Evan Guessand from Nice. Victor Lindelof added ballast as a free transfer and Jadon Sancho and Harvey Elliott came in on loan close to the window closing; those deals may become permanent. Jacob Ramsey was sold ostensibly because he was a pure-profit academy player. So too did Axel Disasi, Rashford, Asensio and Leon Bailey.
Only two of the players who started against Sunderland were not at the club when Emery took over in 2022. The transfer market is important for adding quality but also freshness because new players make a team more unpredictable tactically and offer Plan Bs to the manager. Villa look more than a little stale. It would help if Emery actually started Elliott and/or Sancho.
Emery going too narrow
Last season, Emery set up Villa in a 4-2-3-1 formation in 34 of their 38 league games. That shape asks the two wingers to pick up the ball wide and take on a full-back or drift centrally and allow the full-backs to overlap. Of the 76 starts given to wingers in 2024-25, 36 came from players who are no longer at the club.
So far this season, Emery has kept the same formation but without the wingers. Emi Buendia, Morgan Rogers, Guessand and John McGinn have largely shared the roles – two natural No 10s, a striker and a central midfielder. Rogers has regularly played off the wing in the past but his form so far this season has been bitterly disappointing.
Because of this, Villa simply look too narrow. Whoever starts there tends to come infield for the ball but that leaves little room for stretching the pitch wide. The only option would be for the full-backs to push even higher but Emery seems guarded against being caught on the counter. Crosses tend to come from deep and have been easily dealt with.
Safe, slow passing
All of the above offers a reasonable excuse for psychological disarray, thanks to absent players, but most Villa supporters are pointing to tactical deficiencies in Emery’s setup in possession. No team in the division has had fewer shots on target.
The reason the wide players are dropping deeper or coming infield is because Villa have been far too guilty of safe, sideways passing that may look like control on the surface but rarely actually goes anywhere.
The change of style is obvious. Emery’s team ranks fifth for attempted passes; they were 13th last season. The ability to surprise teams on the counter attack through quick transitions and flying wingers has been lost because Villa are having more of the ball and doing less with it. They were the fourth best team in the division in 2024-25 for successful take-ons (a player attempting to dribble past an opponent and managing it); they are 16th so far this season.
Not only does this safe possession not really create good chances (third lowest average quality – xG – per shot), it has also changed the way Villa play without the ball. Last season they ranked in midtable for tackles in the final third of the pitch. Now they rank dead last.
Watkins being suffocated
Given the move to slower, possession-based football, it’s little surprise that Ollie Watkins is finding things difficult. Watkins hasn’t scored yet this season. Again, this might be simply the result of poor individual performances, but the more pressing suspicion is that this style just isn’t working for this team.
Everything is breaking for Watkins. His total shots per 90 minutes are down, as is the average quality of the chances he is getting (no surprise: slow passes tends to lead to organised defences and less space and time for strikers without effective creativity behind them). In 2023-24, Watkins averaged six touches of the ball in the penalty area every 90 minutes. So far this season he’s down to just 3.9. To complete the picture, Watkins is also taking his shots from further away than last season.
One thing I did find interesting is how, although Villa have had a reasonable number of shots this season (52 for one goal), Watkins’ influence seems to be diminishing. In 2023-24, he had 21 per cent of all Villa’s shots, dropping to 17 per cent last season. So far it’s at 15 per cent in 2025-26.
Perhaps that stands to reason: if you are struggling to break teams down you take more shots from lower-quality positions (although Matty Cash made the most of one against Sunderland) before the ball gets to the striker. But it’s funny how Villa have lost Jhon Duran, Rashford, Bailey and Asensio from last season and yet Watkins is having a lower proportion of shots than he was.
Set-piece cheat code absent
As the Arsenal mantra goes: if you’re struggling to break teams down in open play, go get yourself a corner and cause some carnage. Everybody knows that Arsenal are the best team in the country at scoring from set-pieces because the little graphic comes up on Sky Sports whenever Declan Rice prepares to swing one in.
Arsenal may have been unbeatable at scoring from set pieces last season, but they weren’t the best in the division at creating chances from them: 80 to Villa’s 85. Over 10 per cent of Villa’s total chances came from dead ball situations.
That has dropped too. Villa have created seven set-piece chances in five matches so far in 2025-26. Not only does that see them ranked 15th in the division, their percentage of chances created from set pieces has fallen significantly too.
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