There was a sense that justice had prevailed, if only for 90 minutes, when an Aston Villa side gutted in the summer to comply with financial regulations beat a Manchester City team built over years on the foundations of consistently breaching them.
While City spent lavishly, Villa trod a delicate path between ambitious investment and overspending in an attempt to restore the club to former glories. They relied on loans when the balance sheet was veering into the red, culminating last summer in an exodus of key players from a squad that had won the club’s first trophy in 30 years and qualified for the Champions League.
Would a team still featuring Morgan Rogers, Youri Tielemans, Ollie Watkins, Ezri Konsa and Lucas Digne, riding the wave of their best season in decades, have taken until the fifth Premier League game of the season to win a match?
Unai Emery, the Villa manager, has performed admirably in circumstances that might have forced others to walk away. Signing Nicolas Jackson from Chelsea for £65 million as the club’s marquee forward was a risk. The striker had struggled to shine in the Premier League at Stamford Bridge and a loan spell failed to convince Bayern Munich to make the move permanent.
Yet Emery is a master at working with damaged goods, placing an arm around dropped shoulders while filling players’ brains with video analysis showing where they can improve. He transformed Marcus Rashford, and now Jackson is starting to resemble the clinical forward many expected him to become.
The confidence was quite clearly surging through him when he opened the scoring, pouncing on a mistake by Marc Guéhi before dribbling towards goal and lashing the ball into the roof of Gianluigi Donnarumma’s net from a difficult angle. It was evident again when he attempted the tricky first-time finish that caught out City’s goalkeeper and proved to be the winner. And in the way he effortlessly nudged Rúben Dias off the ball on the halfway line, surging at Guéhi before dragging an effort wide – the City centre-back so tormented by his treatment that he was substituted at half-time.
Emery described Jackson’s maturity, experience and confidence as key differences to the player he coached at Villarreal several years ago. “At the beginning of the season, to adapt to us was more difficult,” Emery said.
“He was shooting a lot of balls over the crossbar. Now he’s getting better. He’s working fantastic tactically; he is understanding where we need him.
“He has his quality and his power – his speed is fantastic and his capacity to get man-to-man or attack players, to pass for others.”
Johan Manzambi, who has just turned 21, arrived as a young player whose main exposure had come at Freiburg. He could reasonably have taken time to settle into a Premier League midfield. Yet already he is integrating into this much-changed Villa side, holding his own against a City double-pivot that cost £241m in the summer.
When Emi Martínez decided he wanted to leave, the club signed Zion Suzuki, a little-known goalkeeper from Parma, for £30m. A string of saves kept Villa ahead before Erling Haaland’s second-half header beat him.
Enzo Maresca, meanwhile, [has inherited a throne built on lies](https://observer.co.uk/tags/manchester-city). Everyone was marvelling at his 100% winning start after succeeding Pep Guardiola – until the announcement dropped that City had been found guilty of the majority of Premier League charges against them, revealing the staggering scale of the rule-breaking, including that accounts were inflated by almost £1bn.
City, of course, still maintain their innocence, but unless their appeal proves otherwise, they are guilty.
Without an artificial financial boost of more than £900m over nine years, would they have beaten Liverpool to signing Guéhi? Would they have enjoyed the sustained success that made joining them, rather than Real Madrid, a more attractive proposition for Haaland?
When Rodri departed in the summer, could they so easily have afforded to pay Chelsea £125m for Enzo Fernández?
Maresca is clearly a talented coach, but there is a reason Emery’s name is being discussed over executive coffees at Old Trafford in case [Michael Carrick continues to struggle](https://observer.co.uk/news/sport/article/carricks-days-are-numbered-so-whose-turn-is-it-next-conte-howe). Every Emery achievement is rooted in diligence, development and skill. Everything Maresca achieves this season will remain under a cloud of questions, fogged by what-ifs and asterisks.
“Everywhere we go, we get it,” said Elliot Anderson, one of two summer signings that broke the £100m barrier, when asked before kick-off about the prospect of hostile treatment.
As the teams lined up before kick-off, the whole of Villa Park – apart from the empty stand currently being rebuilt and the visiting section – sang: “You know what you are, you know what you are, you cheating bastards, you know what you are.” At least the City fans have started seeing the funny side, responding in full voice: “We know what we are…”
Boos greeted Donnarumma every time he retrieved the ball for a goal kick and followed the ball between City players. The cheer was palpable when, after being twice warned by Peter Bankes in the opening five minutes that he was taking too long with his goal kicks, Donnarumma was penalised by the referee and Villa were awarded a corner. And the jeer was that much more venomous when Joško Gvardiol ran the ball out of play under pressure.
The City players crossed the pitch at full-time to applaud the travelling supporters, a familiar chant once again echoed around the stadium – “You know what you are, you know what you are” – the Villa fans savouring a particularly satisfying victory.
Photograph by Morgan Harlow/AP