I’m jealous of Aston Villa’s staggering optimism

Option one: the only way is down now. We have sold – or are selling – most of our best players, which will exacerbate an already inescapable feeling of inevitable decline from the zenith of winning the Europa League final and ending the trophy drought. Option two: we won a European final and things are only going to get better. Now begins a new age of Aston Villa, Unai Emery 2.0. The trophy drought has ended and left a sense of psychological freedom: everything now is a bonus because we’ve already completed everything we wanted. This is how football support in the Premier League works now, a middle ground vacuum with fans either lurching towards rampant optimism and pessimism on a frighteningly regular loop. It’s also what you think everybody is like when you live too much of your life online, which is on me. Aston Villa are the current Premier League exception to the rule and I think it makes them its most fascinating team this season. While the outside world is sucking air through their teeth at Villa’s outgoings, the breaking up of the team that climbed the mountain, every Villa supporter I know is far more pragmatic and accepting. They understand the assumed panic, but don’t share it. It’s all very unusual. Quite frankly, I’m jealous. Morgan Rogers has led the Villa exodus (Photo: AFP) By the end of next week, there is a reasonable chance that six of the starting XI in Istanbul will have left Villa Park: Emiliano Martinez, Lucas Digne, Morgan Rogers, Youri Tielemans, Ezri Konsa and Ollie Watkins. Three have gone so far; the others are strongly linked to the extent that it would now be more surprising if they stayed put. Even if Konsa and Watkins stay, Emery will have lost two of his top three chance creators, goalkeeper, best central midfielder and best attacking midfielder from last season. If they go, the top league goalscorer from 2025-26 will be Emiliano Buendia’s six. Perhaps you think that Amadou Onana is a better midfielder than Tielemans? He’s reportedly out until April 2027. And if all six of those players do indeed leave, it would leave two players who started 22 or more Premier League matches last season: Matty Cash and John McGinn. Replacements will come in (Nicolas Jackson the latest Chelsea x Villa transfer handshake?), but with Joao Gomes and Johan Manzambi injured for the start of the season, no double helpings of optimism can convince anyone that Villa are ready for the opening weekend. At any other club, selling more than half the starting team from a European final within the next 90 days would provoke mutiny, accusations of carelessness, hopelessness or neglect at boardroom level and admiring glances at other clubs with squillionaire owners. At Villa Park, again, different. The most common response (although Konsa leaving would probably move this needle) is: yeah but we needed a refresh. We should celebrate this serenity but we should also interrogate it. Firstly, it is a representation of the limitations under which the club’s leadership is operating. And, even more importantly, the ability of the club to make the supporters understand and blame others for those limitations. Villa were fined €22.5m (£19.4m) for breaching – by a distance – Uefa’s squad-cost rule for 2025. That imposed restrictions but also required the club to significantly decrease their squad-cost ratio over this summer. In 2024-25, they had the sixth highest wage bill in the league but it was only £40m and £71m below Manchester United and Arsenal’s respectively. Their annual revenue (which the club have increased significantly, to their credit) was £297m and £321m below those same two clubs. Whether you agree with Uefa’s rules or not (and I don’t because I think they’re overly protectionist), Villa had little choice but to overhaul a squad that was expensive to run and ageing – eight of players used in the Super Cup last week were aged 28 or over and that didn’t include Watkins or Konsa. In those circumstances, ripping the sticking plaster off might just be the best way rather than multiple years of piecemeal austerity. Read more Nick Harris: The transfer window that broke Fabrizio Romano Daniel Storey: West Ham fans’ Palestine chant is disgusting – and football is to blame But really, this is about one man. While Emery is there, supporters are determined to enjoy whatever happens because they know it is so much more likely to be better with him than without. So what if players leave; the king still governs. Who cares if people think we’re falling apart; Emery is the master rebuilder anyway. One day he won’t be the manager and we will curse ourselves if we have spent time mithering over hypothetical travails. There’s clearly a fragility to this mood and it can certainly be pricked by three months of underwhelming results or a manager expressing doubts about the size of the project. Villa are captivating for the neutral because there is such a range to their outcomes this season and because we can’t quite believe that anyone could pull this off. But the overwhelming desire at Villa is to control their own truth. This isn’t a firesale, it’s a bougie renovation. This isn’t an acceptance of our place in the food chain, it’s a strategy to make sure we keep climbing it. This isn’t the end of an era, it’s the start of a new one. For the sake of non-financially elite clubs everywhere, we should hope that it works.