Aston Villa have started winning again - but they still have some serious problems to address.
Go back a month, and things were looking a little bleak for Aston Villa. A 1-1 draw against ten-man Sunderland had left them winless across their first six games of the season, they looked toothless in front of goal and key players like Ollie Watkins and Morgan Rogers were off the boil.
Since that underwhelming day out at the Stadium of Light, however, Unai Emery has been striding through sunlit uplands. A 2-1 away win over Tottenham Hotspur meant that his team had suddenly won five on the bounce, and all seems to be right with the world once more. But in a strange way, Villa’s recent run of wins has also revealed a significant limitation.
How Aston Villa became far too reliant on Morgan Rogers
One thing that hasn’t improved very much are the performances of Ollie Watkins – but the fact that the forward scored just once in his first 11 matches of the campaign hasn’t been a major problem based on recent results. Villa have found ways to win without him, even if it would make life rather easier were Watkins to find his feet again.
Watkins’ loss of form has been rendered somewhat irrelevant by his team-mate, Morgan Rogers, who has overcome some early jitters of his own to look rather more like the dynamic attacking midfielder who was responsible for 18 combined goals and assists in the Premier League last season.
The 23-year-old has either scored or assisted goals in each of their three top-flight wins so far, having drawn blanks in their first five games. That isn’t a coincidence. Rogers has become the team’s creative fulcrum, a role emphasised by the loss of Marco Asensio and Marcus Rashford, whose loan spells did so much to energise Villa’s 2024/25 season.
Even last season, when there were other players doing the heavy lifting, Villa played far better when Rogers was on the field than when he wasn’t. He didn’t miss much time – he started all but one game in the Premier League – but on average Villa’s goal difference was the equivalent of 1.8 goals better for every 90 minutes that he was on the pitch than when he wasn’t. The sample size is small and that may have been a statistical quirk, but they simply scored far more freely and easily when he was on the pitch than during the times he was either suspended or getting a rest in the second half.
In short, Villa are starting to become very dependent on Rogers. Even after a rough run of form at the very start of the new season, Rogers leads Villa for expected and actual assists and none of his team-mates have exceeded his three total goal contributions in the Premier League. Last season, only Youri Tielemans even came close to generating as many scoring chances.
Tielemans’ calf injury – the Belgian is expected to return in November – is another reason that Rogers has become so vital, especially with Harvey Elliott still bedding in following his summer move. Right now, Rogers is the team’s beating creative heart, and if his form were to fall away again, even for a few games, or were he to get hurt himself, it’s difficult to see where the goals will come from.
Why leaning on Rogers could become a problem for Unai Emery
There is an obvious downside to leaning too hard on one player – that their own form can essentially become that of the entire team, as has happened to some extent this season – but in the case of Villa’s dependence on Rogers, there is another major drawback: Rogers does not create that many chances.
Given that he led the club’s charts for creating goals and opportunities last season, that may seem like a strange statement, but Rogers has developed into a player who deals in occasional moments of quality and who doesn’t generate chances in volume.
Last season, for instance, he created a modest 3.04 shooting chances for his team-mates per 90 minutes, generally a below-par mark for a top-flight winger or number ten. This season, it’s down to just 1.77.
In essence, Rogers isn’t a player who grabs games by the scruff of the neck and imposes himself upon them but a player who enlivens them with occasional moments of grace and quality. That’s not a problem when there are other players to take the strain during the passages of play in which Rogers is becalmed, but it is an issue when everything has to run through the same player. Rogers is not built for the job which Emery needs him to do.
A switch to Emery’s occasionally-used 4-2-2-2 formation against Spurs helped somewhat, as it put John McGinn in closer proximity to Rogers and eased the burden on him slightly, but that’s a tactic only really suited to teams who leave space between defence and midfield to exploit. Width will still be a necessity against many other teams and that strategy isn’t a cure-all even if it worked once.
Tielemans will be back sooner or later and that will help considerably, while Emery probably needs to get Elliott involved rather more to share the load, but it would also help if Rogers wasn’t left quite as isolated as he can be when Villa play in a 4-2-3-1 formation too. It would certainly help if Watkins or another forward could start putting away some of the scrappy half-chances that will come their way even when Villa’s primary playmaker isn’t creating them.
Villa have plenty of quality but lack balance. Rashford and Asensio provided that balance last season, but right now opposing teams come into games knowing that if they can shut Rogers down then Villa’s other 10 players may struggle to find ways through.
This is a team who have generated the sum total of 6.3xG’s worth of chances all season – only Burnley have created less in the entire Premier League and Crystal Palace, by way of comparison, have almost triple that figure. Villa need more creativity, more imagination and more ways to goal. As wonderful as Rogers is, he isn’t the answer on his own.
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