On 20 October 2022, Aston Villa lost 3-0 at Fulham and Steven Gerrard was sacked. 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. But he took over Villa at the perfect point, when expectations were relatively low and significant investment was about to be made. They were ready for growth and he was ready to lead it.

His first game in charge was a 3-1 home win over Manchester United, whom Villa host on Sunday afternoon. That felt hugely significant. It was Villa’s first league win over United since the opening day of 1995-96, the “you’ll win nothing with kids” match. But in one specific sense, that game was illusory: United remain Villa’s betes noires. Villa have beaten them only three times in their past 53 meetings.

In that regard, what happened on the final day of last season was perhaps only to be expected. Victory for Villa at Old Trafford, where nine other sides had won league games last season, would have guaranteed Champions League football. As it turned out, with Newcastle losing, a point would have been enough for Villa. But Emi Martínez was witlessly sent off in the first half and they conceded two in the final 15 minutes to slip into the Europa League.

That disappointment seemed to affect them. Their summer transfer activity was limited as they lost Jacob Ramsey and bought Evann Guessand. Off the pitch, there was a lot of grumbling about profitability and sustainability rules and how they check ambition, a stance that ignores both the happenstance that they are owned by Egypt’s richest man and a billionaire American asset manager, and that the biggest check on their ambition was losing to a terrible United. On it, Villa began as though in a funk, failing to win any of their opening six games.

Bologna at home at the end of September, though, marked the beginning of a run of 15 victories in 17 games. They have won their past 11 Premier League games other than the 2-0 defeat at Liverpool. Crystal Palace are the only side to have beaten them at home in 2025. If the Premier League season had begun on the day of the Bologna game, Villa would be three points clear of Manchester City at the top. As it is, they went into this weekend three points adrift of Arsenal, the leaders.

There is still a widespread assumption that Villa are not really in the title race, a feeling based on more than preconceptions about their status. Only Tottenham are overperforming their expected goals by more than Villa this season; in only two games have Villa had an xG more than 0.5 greater than their opponents. But this to an extent is Emery’s method.

He seems more comfortable at an aspirant upper mid-table club than a true giant (and if they have the letters V, L and A in their name, so much the better). Although part of the Basque school that has replaced the German gegenpressers and the Portuguese periodisationalists as the pre-eminent force in modern tactical thinking, Emery is no great philosopher, no evangelist for any particular system. Rather he is a pragmatist adept at working with the margins.

There is a growing theory that xG models, trained as they are on data from a period in which Pep Guardiola-style process football was dominant, may not be such a good guide to the more direct, set-piece-based game that has taken over in the past year or so. As the first flush of excitement at the possibilities of data fades, there is a renewed interest in character and mentality.

Villa have that in spades: they have come from behind in four of their past five away league games. The odd game out there was their strangely limp defeat at Anfield when, although they hit the woodwork twice, there was a sense of failing to exploit Liverpool’s obvious weakness to direct balls played behind the full-backs.

But then Villa’s record against Liverpool – no wins in their past 11 meetings – is almost as bad as that against United. It’s as though they have some strange inferiority complex against the two most successful sides in English history. That fits with the sense of Emery as honest upper mid-table striver, a Europa League man who doesn’t look quite right in the Champions League.

That may be unfair. There were plenty of issues during his stints at PSG and Arsenal that had nothing to do with Emery. And Villa have won three of their last five against Arsenal, the third most successful side. But his Villa would look a lot more persuasive as potential champions if they could end the hoodoo and see off an inconsistent United on Sunday.