Should Manchester United go for Unai Emery, a podcast staple that began during Ineos’s fabled summer review when the future of Erik ten Hag was in the balance, is back on the chatroom agenda. The ethical question of pursuing a manager who signed a five-year contract extension at Aston Villa in May poses no problem for the desperate, and United are certainly that.
The appeal of Emery would be strong in a stacked field. In the context of the current paucity of candidates he is the name-your-price target for supporters and pundits. Whether he might listen to the siren call of a failing giant is another matter. Andy Townsend told TalkSport listeners “all the tea in China” would not persuade the Spaniard to desert a Villa team he has forged into title contenders. Former United bit-part keeper Ben Foster begged to differ when he posed the question in the summer on his eponymous show Fozcast.
Villa continue along the Champions League high road against Bayern Munich on Wednesday after marking the return to elite European football following a 40-year absence with a 3-0 victory at Young Boys. Nothing validates Emery’s work, nor demonstrates the performance differential with Ten Hag, more than a visit of a European superpower on a Wednesday night while United head off to Porto for a second-tier gig on backwater Thursday.
Emery has achieved this with a transfer outlay of £150m in the four windows since his arrival in October 2022, and a third of that was spent on one player, record-signing this summer Amadou Onana from Everton. Ten Hag burned through £180m in the summer alone, taking his total outlay in four windows to £560m.
While Ten Hag begs inexplicably for patience, Emery continues to shape the remarkable transformation of one of England’s legacy clubs. In this data-driven epoch played out on perfect surfaces Emery’s love of detail and elephantine work ethic is reaping Guardiola-like rewards. The only enemies he has made at Villa are the blokes responsible for locking the gates at the Bodymoor Heath training complex, where Emery spends 12-hour days in a relentless cycle of analysis and preparation.
At the heart of the enterprise is the circle of trust with key aides, director of football Damian Vidagany, and Monchi, who built his reputation as director of football during his shared time with Emery at Sevilla, and operates at Villa under the title president of football operations. Villa paid Villareal £6m to get their man five months after United appointed Ten Hag. Ouch.
There are few secrets in the coaching sphere. Ten Hag is not failing for want of knowledge or understanding of coaching mores or developments. He is surrounded by trusted aides and spends as much time on the details as the next guru. You need only listen to his analysis of matches when in the pundit’s chair in his native Netherlands to get a sense of his grasp of tactics. The difference is in the delivery of what he knows in the context of Manchester United and Premier League football, an environment that seems to overwhelm him.
Emery brings intensity as well as knowledge, plus the experience of “failing” in the Premier League at Arsenal. Emery suffered with Ten Hag-like issues at the Emirates, where Nicolas Pepe was an expensive forerunner of Antony at Old Trafford and Kieran Tierney, a highly-rated left-back from Celtic, was Luke Shaw 2.0, constantly battling injury. Emery was also tasked with radically updating Arsene Wenger’s cultural framework, which ultimately proved too much, the club losing patience after just 18 months.
He was not helped by a poor grasp of English, which seemed to exacerbate the sense of a coach out of his depth. He was not afforded the time to unravel his “Bs” and “Vs” and impose a sense of order.
Denied the trust of the owners, his job became impossible but failure in his case did not accord with his qualities as a coach. He just needed the right villa, which he found immediately at Villarreal and subsequently Villa Park. Now, you might think that an argument in favour of United persisting with Ten Hag, except it ignores Emery’s prior record of success in Spain and France, and his subsequent work on the Costa del Azahar and in Birmingham.
He arrived at Bodymoor Heath armed with a portfolio of clips of the Villa squad to demonstrate players’ strengths and weaknesses. He raised the tempo and quality of training, erasing the torpor of Steven Gerrard’s reign. Where Gerrard relied on a sense of his own worth and charisma to inspire improvement, Emery explained in fine detail what he wanted and showed the lads how to get there. Players are suckers for clear instructions. Emery’s methods were quickly absorbed in training and results have followed an upward trajectory.
All of which will be apparent against Bayern and on Sunday against United. This does not guarantee victory, just makes it more likely. And when setbacks occur, as they did at home to Arsenal in the second game of the season, it does not feel like the roof is about to fall in.
A fine second-half save by David Raya to deny Ollie Watkins with the scores level was followed by a rare mistake in the Villa goal by Emi Martinez on which Arsenal capitalised. Villa were on top and looked capable of repeating the defeat they inflicted on the Gunners at the Emirates in April that killed their championship hopes.
Emery accepted the defeat and calmly fell back into a winning rhythm. Such is the difference in temperature between the clubs, few give United an earthly on Sunday, a contest that might yet trigger Ten Hag’s Old Trafford departure. Whether it would presage Emery’s arrival is a question only Ineos can answer.
