Having a firm grip on the smaller details has traditionally been Unai Emery’s managerial forte — the nuances that help craft a game plan led to Champions League qualification last season for his Aston Villa team and an aptitude to problem-solve quickly during matches.
But the current campaign is very different. Broader issues have taken hold.
That is to say, there is little point in focusing on the colour of the paint on the walls when the building is in danger of collapse.
Sunday’s 3-0 away defeat against Chelsea means Villa are on their worst stretch of form in two-and-a-half years and extends their winless run to eight games, losing five of them.
Emery’s post-match press conference concentrated on Villa’s competitors “getting stronger”, with Chelsea’s improvement under new head coach Enzo Maresca a case in point.
In truth, the schisms opening up between Villa and their direct rivals for, as Emery describes, a “top seven” place have been hastened by their own decline. It has reached a point where the finer details are being drowned out by damning statistics, namely Villa recording the joint-fewest clean sheets in the 2024-25 Premier League.
Their defensive record is a reflection of alarming downward trends.
In the previous 18 league matches, going back to April, Villa have kept a solitary clean sheet and conceded 34 times — an average of 1.88 goals per game. Before Sunday, Villa had been underperforming their expected goals against total (xGA) by 4.4 goals.
There is a case to be heard that such a porous defensive record has been coming.
Long-term patterns show a team who have become incrementally more open and more susceptible to conceding. Emery garnered initial success and Conference League qualification in his 2022-23 debut season through defensive solidity, with Villa winning their final seven home games while shipping just two goals. Back then, they had a 36.1 per cent clean sheet rate, offering an immediate and robust foundation for Emery’s in-possession patterns.
A gradual decline took hold the following season, with a 21 per cent clean sheet record. The drop-off was invariably compensated by over-performance in Villa’s expected goals (xG) metric and having a 14.7 per cent shot conversion rate between August 2023 and September 2024 — the most clinical ratio of any Premier League side.
Villa possessed a threat on transition which made opponents wary and gave them a constant ability to land blows back, having often conceded or trailed. It is little wonder current defensive frailties and a clean sheet rate of 7.7 per cent — another stark drop-off — are being illuminated by the absence of goals. Plainly, for the quality of chances created, data suggests Villa should have scored five more goals than they actually have, an xG underperformance that’s second-worst in the league.
Underlying numbers — not concrete but a good indicator of performance — suggest this is not sustainable nor conducive to a side who aim to compete regularly at the top level.
The lack of in-form attacking players has laid Villa’s defensive record bare, evidenced once more at Stamford Bridge when Ollie Watkins missed a critical one-v-one opportunity at 1-0 down, a cast-iron example of Villa being unable to put the pressure back on the opposition and, instead, gradually sinking.
Avoidable errors in defence have proliferated during the winless run. While Pau Torres’ pass-back to Emiliano Martinez yesterday was not the clearest sign of brain fog from a Villa defender — Tyrone Mings’ decision to scoop the ball up into his hands against Belgium’s Club Brugge in the Champions League remains the apex there — it was another example of self-implosion.
Creative ways to self-destruct threatened to become routine when Martinez then passed to Nicolas Jackson inside the box a few minutes later, only to scramble the ball away to safety but injure his hand in the process.
Individual mistakes compounded the lack of defensive cohesion.
The consistency of last season was predicated on a nimbleness and ability to think quickly on their feet. Here, though, Villa kept running down the same blind alleys and, as Maresca would explain after, walking into the traps that Jackson, when pressing from the front, was setting. Jackson’s role was to press Ezri Konsa and Martinez, and cut off the pass to whichever one did not have the ball. Consequently, Villa toiled to play out from the back and meant they could never regulate the game’s tempo.
Emery’s Villa have never been the most defensively active team. Last season, they traditionally used player positioning as their most effective defensive tool, ranking low across tackles, pressures in the attacking third, interceptions and recoveries.
That has continued into this campaign. Villa have made the fewest ball recoveries of any team, and the second-least interceptions. “They don’t press, they wait,” said Maresca.
Such a passive approach requires a compact structure, squeezing space between the lines and funnelling opponents into ineffective areas of the pitch. These traits were plainly absent during the move for Chelsea’s second goal, which carved through Villa’s midfield and ended with Enzo Fernandez finishing from just inside the box.
Arguably, the greatest paradox is the difference in defensive records between Villa’s domestic and Champions League form. Four clean sheets across five Champions League games — the only goal being in Bruges, caused by Mings’ handball — suggest Villa do retain an ability to be resolute. Ironically, only five days ago they became the first team since Chelsea in 1999 to keep clean sheets in their first three Champions League home games of a season with the goalless draw against Juventus.
Emery has admitted he is struggling to explain the contrast. Villa’s league record, however, offers a deeper, more reliable evaluation.
Competing in the Champions League offers up the idea of fatigue setting in which, in turn, impacts domestic form. In reality, that line of reasoning is too cliched; many of this squad were playing on Thursday nights in the Conference League and then Sundays domestically last season, typically having one day less rest than they’re getting now. Villa are accustomed to congested schedules but are not used to this prolonged decline in form. When confidence is low, legs look heavier and minds tire faster.
At surface level, little has changed structurally from last season, aside from Villa’s offside trap being tapered and less pronounced. Martinez is also not sweeping long balls over the top as regularly, making fewer defensive actions per 90 minutes outside his penalty box (1.08, down from 1.84).
Emery spent a lot of the second half yesterday sitting on the bench or with his hands in his pockets, deep in thought. Remedying defensive issues would allow him to go back to thinking about the finer details once more.
(Top photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
