Emery's Quest for the UEFA Super Cup with Aston Villa
Unai Emery has built an empire in the Europa League. Five titles now, the latest carved out with Aston Villa in May, when Freiburg were beaten in Istanbul and a 30-year wait for silverware in the Midlands finally snapped.
Yet one trophy keeps slipping through his fingers.
On Wednesday night in Salzburg, the Spaniard walks back into a familiar arena of frustration. The UEFA Super Cup. Three times he has stood on that touchline. Three times he has watched someone else lift it.
This time, it is Paris St-Germain in his way – the Champions League winners, his former club, and the team that once represented his own step up to the elite. Now they stand between him and the one piece of European business he has never quite finished.
A perfectionist with a score to settle
Emery is not a man who shrugs and moves on. Last season he set his players a clear domestic target: third place in the Premier League. Not because it guaranteed anything more than fourth, but because he had not done it with Villa.
They finished fourth. A landmark achievement for the club, but not quite the number he had circled. For a manager wired like Emery, that sticks.
The Super Cup is cut from the same cloth. Some see it as a glossy curtain-raiser, a glamorous friendly with medals. He does not. He has been burned by it too often.
Real Madrid in 2014. Barcelona in 2015. Chelsea on penalties in Dublin in 2021. Cristiano Ronaldo decided one, Lionel Messi another. Sevilla lost again to Real in 2016, by which time Emery had already gone to PSG.
Now, at Red Bull Arena, he gets another crack at it, with around 6,000 Villa fans making the journey and the ghosts of those nights trailing in behind him.
“He was reminding me last week,” Emery said, nodding at captain John McGinn as he recalled that shootout defeat to Chelsea. The smile told one story. The eyes, another.
“Of course, it's an opportunity. A trophy is something that can give us a special moment. To play for trophies is, as a professional, our objective.
“PSG are the favourites but I am looking forward to playing, how we can test this match against PSG with our capacity?
“As a coach, as a player, as a club, it's a trophy. It's one thing that makes us proud of how we are and how we arrive here.”
How much does it really matter?
Carlo Ancelotti sits on five Super Cups, two with AC Milan and three with Real Madrid. Pep Guardiola has four – two at Barcelona, one at Bayern Munich, one with Manchester City. For the true heavyweights, the Super Cup has become a kind of punctuation mark on an era of dominance.
Ancelotti’s third came at Emery’s expense, when Real beat Sevilla in 2014. Another scar on a long European résumé.
Yet the debate lingers. Is this competition a genuine prize, or just the most glamorous of dress rehearsals? The comparison with Sunday’s Community Shield between Arsenal and Manchester City is hard to avoid: a trophy, yes, but one that arrives before the real grind begins.
Inside PSG’s camp, the message is clear. They are treating it as a trophy, not a tune-up.
Vitinha, already a four-time Ligue 1 champion, brushed aside any notion that back-to-back Champions League winners might take it lightly. He did, though, admit the French side’s “pre-season was a little short”.
“We're still hungry for victories, trophies. It's very difficult to maintain those levels but we're still hungry,” the Portugal midfielder said.
Defender Marquinhos echoed that hunger and pointed to the standards they are desperate to protect. PSG were unhappy with the size of their dressing room at Red Bull Arena and were given an extra one by Uefa, a small reminder of the scale of the operation that follows them.
“Just because we've won things these past seasons, that doesn't mean it's easy. We know there'll be plenty of obstacles,” Marquinhos said.
“Personally, I want more, and each player in the squad is like that. We've all worked to get here, to arrive in the best condition.”
A rematch with history still fresh
This is not just any Super Cup pairing. It is a re-run of one of last season’s wildest Champions League ties.
In the 2024-25 quarter-final, PSG appeared to be cruising. They won the first leg 3-1 at Parc des Princes and then stormed into a 2-0 lead in Birmingham, stretching the aggregate score to 5-1. Villa looked buried.
Then Villa Park erupted.
Emery’s side roared back, scoring three times to win 3-2 on the night and drag the tie to the brink of chaos. They went out 5-4 on aggregate, but the comeback turned heads all over Europe and underlined how far Emery had dragged Villa into the continent’s elite conversation.
PSG have not forgotten that scare. Vitinha admitted the memory still stings.
“It was such a difficult test, especially the second half,” he said. “We'll be ready but we're conscious of how difficult it's going to be.”
A new-look Villa, same edge
Here is the twist: that Villa team is already fading into the past.
Just 484 days after that quarter-final, Emery’s line-up in Austria will look drastically different. Morgan Rogers, Lucas Digne and Youri Tielemans have been sold. Amadou Onana, such a towering presence in midfield, is out injured until next year.
Boubacar Kamara has made the squad but is only just returning from the serious knee injury he suffered in January. He is not yet the relentless, covering force Villa lost midway through last season.
Emi Martinez, Ezri Konsa and Ollie Watkins have all been given a month off after their World Cup exertions and have not travelled. The spine that carried Villa through so many big nights is scattered.
The upshot? There is a realistic chance only four of the starters from that PSG tie will begin this one. Five of the substitutes that night have moved on as well. For a side that has felt so settled and methodical under Emery, it is a jarring level of change.
McGinn, now the voice of continuity in a shifting squad, has seen the club’s transformation up close.
“A lot has changed in the eight years I've been here,” the skipper said.
“When you are signing the best young English talent and players are performing at the highest level there will be interest.
“We have a structure in place, standards and rules which have made us a success. I'm really excited about the new Aston Villa.
“We have our main core, the same manager, same methods and same desire to achieve more. A lot of people thought we reached a ceiling a couple of seasons ago and we proved them wrong.”
That is the tension that hangs over Salzburg. PSG arrive as European champions, bristling with expectation and still nursing memories of a Villa side that refused to lie down. Villa arrive in transition, yet still carrying the imprint of a coach who has built his reputation on nights exactly like this.
Emery has his Europa League empire. The question now is whether, against his old club and with a reshaped squad, he can finally claim the one European trophy that keeps slipping through his grasp.
