Unai Emery's Aston Villa made a serious blunder in the 2025 summer transfer windowplaceholder image
Unai Emery's Aston Villa made a serious blunder in the 2025 summer transfer window | Getty Images
Aston Villa have been on fire on the pitch, but their summer transfer blunder continues to haunt them
Being a director of football probably isn’t all that easy of a job – certainly, as I’ve discovered over the past few months, they can get things just as wrong as an opinion columnist. After all, both myself and the man in charge of Aston Villa’s recruitment this summer both made exactly the same mistake.
That mistake was to think that Harvey Elliott would be a fine addition for Aston Villa. Monchi, who has since left Villa Park, brought the Liverpool midfielder over from Anfield on a loan-to-buy deal worth up to £30m. I described him as the best signing of the summer. Neither of us appeared to have reached the correct conclusion.
But just how did Elliott go from a summer of success with the Young Lions to a perennial bench-warmer under Unai Emery? How did he go from a favourite under Jürgen Klopp to an exile with Arne Slot? And what does the future hold for a talented player with no immediate home?
How Harvey Elliott fell out of favour at both Liverpool and Aston Villa
The last 18 months of Elliott’s career have essentially been a downward slide which started with Slot’s appointment at Anfield and was punctuated, all too briefly, by his starring role with England Under-21s at June’s European Championship.
That was the last time we got to see the best of Elliott – creative, decisive, taking games by the scruff of the neck and refusing to let go. Operating as a hybrid of winger and number 10, he scored five goals, was rightly named player of the tournament, and there’s no question that England would not have won the competition without him. He was head and shoulders above the best young players in Europe when it mattered most.
That tournament in Slovakia showed us the player that Klopp saw when he trusted him in big matches, the player that earned rave reviews at Ewood Park when he sparkled on loan at Blackburn Rovers, and the player that Villa thought they were signing this summer. Prior to this season, most pundits thought that Slot was the only man in football who couldn’t see what use Elliott might be.
Emery appears to have joined him. Elliott has played just five times for his new club in all competitions, made only two starts, and hasn’t completed 90 minutes once. He hasn’t featured at all since the very beginning of October, and it’s been made fairly clear that he won’t make the 10 appearances required to make that £30m transfer fee obligatory.
Emery hasn’t offered much insight into why Elliott isn’t playing, saying only that “there are other players performing very well, this is the first argument of why he is not playing” when asked – adding that the club “are going to decide” on the 22-year-old’s future in January. It feels like a decision which has already been made.
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of personal or behavioural issues, and if there have been problems behind the scenes then they have been kept very quiet. Nor has Elliott kicked up any kind of a public fuss.
It may be that neither manager can quite work out how to best use him, which may, in fairness, not be as straightforward as Lee Carsley made it look for the Under-21s. Elliott is arguably too slow to be a true winger, not consistent enough at beating a man one-on-one to be a number ten, and not strong enough defensively to play in a deeper midfield role.
None of those ideas are entirely untrue, and it has made Elliott – who started as a winger, adapted to become more of a number eight under Klopp and was used as a floating attacking midfielder by Carsley – a tricky player to pin down. Not every tactical system has a niche he can comfortably fill without trade-offs.
He has his strengths, not least his superb passing and creativity in and around the box, but Emery hasn’t found a use for them and neither did Slot – at Liverpool, Mohamed Salah had the right wing role to himself and the roles in the Dutchman’s midfield were much less fluid than they had been under Klopp. Elliott did not suit a double pivot, so he was sidelined and eventually moved on.
What does the future hold for Harvey Elliott?
The upshot of all this is that Elliott will most likely have his loan terminated in January and head back to Anfield, but if Slot is still the manager there – not necessarily guaranteed, given Liverpool’s recent form – then a return to his parent club may not solve much in the shirt term.
FIFA registration rules mean that Elliott cannot play a competitive match for more than two teams in one season, meaning that because he came on as an injury-time substitute for Liverpool against Newcastle United in August, there is no possibility that he can be loaned or sold to another club until the summer. Whether he remains at Villa Park or heads back to Merseyside, he will be stuck for a little while longer.
There is, at least, likely to be interest come the summer. Newcastle are known long-term admirers but his struggles in the Midlands won’t have helped his stock and if they saw him as a right-winger, then they may not wish to roll the dice twice on that position after spending a considerable amount on Anthony Elanga. They do use a midfield three, which should suit Elliott were he to play a deeper role, but Eddie Howe has typically prioritised natural ball-winners and ball-carriers in that role, and those are not among Elliott’s greatest strengths.
There is also the possibility of a move abroad, although that may not be the player’s preference – RB Leipzig tried to sign him in the summer before Villa came in, but reports suggested at the time that Elliott preferred to stay in England. In hindsight, that may not have been the wisest move.
It’s hard to imagine Elliott staying at Villa Park. Aston Villa don’t appear any more interested in playing him that Arne Slot did, and given that Elliott can only play four more matches before they are compelled to spend £30m on him, there is little motivation for either manager or player to continue the current arrangement. The drawback is that he doesn’t seem much more likely to be involved at Liverpool than he was before he left.
Ahead of the 2025/26 season, perhaps a supremely gifted player who can and has proven to be a match winner in the right surroundings will find a better home for his continued development. Where that home might be remains impossible to determine as it stands, however, and this looks likely to be a lost campaign for one of English football’s most talented players.
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