Matt Maher
Published8th Apr 2026, 13:30 BST
Updated8th Apr 2026, 13:30 BST
Thursday begins 45 days which will define Villa’s season and just possibly an era.
The first leg of a Europa League quarter-final tie in Bologna is the first of a potential 12 matches between now and May 24 for Unai Emery’s team.
When the final whistle goes at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium to signal the end of their campaign, Villa will hope to have secured both a return to the Champions League and ended the club’s 30-year wait for a major trophy.
There has never been any doubt Emery prioritises the respective goals in precisely that order.
The manager has always been clear success in the Premier League, the primary route to qualifying for the Champions League, comes before everything else.
Internally, it continues to be the message drilled into players and staff. Confirmation the Premier League will have five places in next year’s competition, therefore, is a significant boost with fourth-placed Villa possessing a six-point cushion over sixth-placed Chelsea with just seven matches remaining.
Yet in a campaign where his team’s form has fluctuated, sometimes wildly, the Europa League has always provided a viable, alternative route back into Europe’s top club competition.
Aston Villa boss Unai Emery.placeholder image
Aston Villa boss Unai Emery. | Getty Images
It is where Villa have shown their greatest consistency, winning nine out of 10 matches. It is also where they have the chance to end what is comfortably the club’s longest wait for major silverware since the end of the Second World War.
Previously, the biggest gap was the 14 years between the League Cup wins of 1961 and 1975. Whichever way you square it, a trophy is long overdue.
No-one who has taken even a casual glance at Villa’s finances over the past couple of years could ignore the importance of getting back into the Champions League when it comes to the balance sheet.
For all the talk about sustainability, so much of the club’s strategy is geared around being hooked to the elite tournament’s greater wealth drip.
Yet as defender Pau Torres noted during an interview with a Spanish newspaper during the international break, when it comes to leaving a legacy, it is silverware that really matters most.
No team has ever paraded a copy of the club’s accounts around the pitch.
“The only thing people will truly remember is if we win a title,” he said.
There can be no arguments there. No team has ever been invited back, decades later, to parade a copy of the accounts around the pitch.
Torres’ words echoed those spoken by the likes of John McGinn, Tyrone Mings and others at other points of the season.
All have been part of a team which, over the past three seasons, has been brilliantly consistent. This is the third straight campaign Villa have reached the last-eight of European competition, a feat the club had never come close to previously achieving. They also reached the semi-finals of last season’s FA Cup.
Yet so far there have been no additions to the trophy cabinet.
Of course, the more you play in the final stages of competitions, the more the chance you will eventually achieve your goal.
But at some point, you need to get over the line. A team which has now been together for several seasons, might not get too many more opportunities to do so. Fair or not, the narrative around them is of a unit which has a habit of stumbling at the final hurdle.
The next six-and-a-half weeks, starting in Italy, offers the chance to change that once and for all.
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