Why Emery is the right man to crash the Big Six with his heroic Villans
Yes, OK, we’ve been here before. Middling club outperforms expectations. Some posturing newspaper type declares them a new member of the Big Six/Super League/ Garrick Club. Club reaches the upper echelons of European competition. Injury crises and scheduling pressures and a bad patch hit club square in the short and curlies.
Club then returns from whence they came, tail between their legs, with varying levels of brutality. Think Leicester City, Everton, even, previously, Aston Villa. But what if this time it actually happens?
Villa, fourth in the Premier League, have just extended Unai Emery’s contract until 2027. They are betting the house on a Spaniard whose previous stint in England lasted 18 months at Arsenal. Yet this doesn’t feel like a gamble.
In less than 18 months, Emery has taken Villa from 16th to fourth. They have beaten Arsenal twice and Manchester City this season. Emery has developed Ollie Watkins from a promising forward to one of the league’s most prolific and versatile strikers.
Villa have provided Emery a degree of control very rarely afforded in modern management. Alongside long-time allies Monchi (president of football operations) and Damian Vidagany (director of football operations and occasional press conference translator), the 52-year-old heads a close-knit triumvirate who are rebuilding Villa in their own image.
Everything that happens from here is going to be wrapped up in profitability and sustainability regulations (PSR) and massive transfer bids, in risking losses to reinvest the profits. But if anyone can guide the Villans across these rapids, it’s Emery.
The plans to expand Villa Park’s capacity to 50,000 and introduce an entertainment venue called “Villa Live” have already been torpedoed due to cost and convenience. President Chris Heck said this was a decision made to protect fans, but surely he will soon realise the best way to protect fans is to invest in this revenueboosting infrastructure. It won’t even infringe on PSR in their old or new form.
Because the Big Six is not a group based on performance, it’s based on revenue. Arsenal, the smallest of the six financially, still created double the turnover of Villa and fellow aspirants Newcastle United in 2022-23.
Turning the Big Six to an Elite Eight is as much an exercise in revenue development as it is in footballing operations. Of course the latter can produce the former – the guaranteed £50m or so for Champions League qualification certainly does – but infrastructure can be just as important, as Tottenham Hotspur continue to demonstrate.
Newcastle and Villa have the same PSR struggles ahead, especially with the introduction of a squad-cost ratio in 2025-26. But in Emery and Eddie Howe they have the managers necessary to sustain continued overperformance with smaller allowed budgets. Selling well will be their biggest challenge – gaining as much capital and headroom as possible for the smallest material loss on-field.
If on-pitch performance stays at its current level, or perhaps even slightly higher, then these clubs can both rely on European football, and its income, for some time. While that is happening, it should be the boardroom’s primary challenge to push revenue into hyperspeed through respective stadium projects and increased sponsorship deals based on improving status. Developing their global fanbases by selling their successes should also be a priority.
All of this considered, next season presents a tremendous opportunity for Villa and Newcastle.
If they can break into the top six for another season in 202425, potentially even securing Champions League football once again, then they will have the revenue basis to continue building sustainably.
And so, step-by-step, there is a plan here for Villa and Newcastle to break the current doom-cycle for ambitious clubs, based on improving revenue off the pitch while trusting the excellent managers they currently have to navigate PSR. We will not see an Elite Eight by 2025, but we might by 2030 if they can hold their nerves.