Former Arsenal coach Unai Emery is returning to the Premier League to replace the outgoing Steven Gerrard at Aston Villa.
With Arsenal, PSG and a record four Europa league trophies on his CV, Unai Emery brings heft to Aston Villa. However, he’s an enigmatic manager and will feel he has something to prove in England.
Unai Emery is perhaps most analogous to David Moyes – a manager who can make an underdog team greater than the sum of its parts. He can help teams like Sevilla to compete, but at Arsenal and PSG he fell short.
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To be fair, his Arsenal tenure was doomed from the start. Any manager who took over from Arsene Wenger was going to fail. He found himself in the midst of executive dysfunction at a club experiencing a midlife crisis.
He barely missed out on Champions League qualification via the league and lost the Europa League final to Chelsea. Afterwards, the fans who never took him to their bosoms, lost faith in him and he never turned it around.
Similarly at PSG he was the victim of circumstance, the circumstance being nobody can succeed at PSG. You’re expected to win the league as a given and if you don’t win the Champions League, you failed.
It was his first superclub and despite the mitigations, he undeniably struggled with managing the egos of superstars. The trainwreck of a squad he then inherited at Arsenal only fuelled those misgivings.
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Having said that, he is still a better man manager than the inexperienced Steven Gerrard, who lost the dressing room. The lack of superstars at Aston Villa means Emery can focus on coaching the team, which he is good at.
Villa are a faded, historic club with aspirations of being a dark horse. They want to challenge for a European place and perhaps win a cup or two along the way. For that purpose, Unai Emery could prove to be an astute appointment.
