How Unai Emery's electric Aston Villa can emulate unimaginable Claudio Ranieri glory with a twist

Aston Villa are living the dream under Unai Emery. The Spaniard has transformed the underperforming team he inherited into one of the best in the Premier League and in Europe. The club took a bold decision to fire English football legend Steven Gerrard in October 2022 when they were languishing in 16th place in the league.

When they hired Unai Emery, the task was to salvage their season so he could build on it the next year. He overachieved, finishing 7th, which was good enough to secure them a UEFA Conference League spot, their first time in Europe in 13 years.

Just when people attributed his early success at Villa Park to the new manager bounce, he made critics eat humble pie with disbelief on their faces when he achieved a historic top-four finish, sending the Villans back to the elite level of European football for the first time in 41 years.

In the UEFA Champions League, they were expected to be among the whipping boys despite coming from the highly competitive Premier League. Their first game was against Young Boys, a regular team in European competition, but Unai Emery and his lads made mincemeat of them with a 3-0 away win.

The next game was against one of the competition’s favourites, led by the best striker in the world, Harry Kane. Bookmakers and connoisseurs expected a baptism of fire, considering Bayern Munich often takes no prisoners even against their peers when they are in top form. They were coming off a 9-2 thrashing of Dinamo Zagreb, Champions League regulars, on match day one.

The six-time European champions came, and fielded their best, only for Jhon Duran to strike a dagger through their hearts in a masterclass performance on Wednesday night, which saw them repeat the exact scoreline against the same opposition that secured them their European title in 1982.

If Aston Villa can play this way against a firing Bavarian side and come out as victors, no one can stop them from dreaming. After two games, they sit among the table-toppers with six points.

The last two UEFA Champions League tournaments have taught us that with the luck of the draw in the knockout stage, any team can make the grand finals. Borussia Dortmund, who were struggling for a top-four finish in the Bundesliga, made last year’s final and almost won the trophy against record holders Real Madrid, but for their poor finishing. Inter Milan did something similar the previous season with a less fancied side by their standard.

Having Unai Emery, with his wealth of experience in European football, the Villans can dream. They have a knockout specialist who can go toe-to-toe against the best tacticians in this era.

The Spaniard can be Aston Villa’s Claudio Ranieri, not in the Premier League but in the UEFA Champions League. Just as the Italian couldn’t win the Premier League with the oil-rich Chelsea of the Roman Abramovich era but won with Leicester City, Unai Emery couldn’t win the UCL with oil-rich PSG. Maybe fate was preparing him for an unimaginable feat with Aston Villa.