Unai Emery Chases First Super Cup with Aston Villa

Unai Emery has built an empire in Europe’s second competition. Five Europa League titles, the latest with Aston Villa in May, when Freiburg were swept aside in Istanbul and a 30-year wait for silverware in Birmingham finally ended.

Yet the Super Cup keeps slipping through his fingers.

On Wednesday night in Salzburg, at Red Bull Arena, he gets another crack at it. Aston Villa against Paris St-Germain. Europa League winners against back-to-back Champions League winners. Emery against his past.

He has been here before. Too many times for his liking.

Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea. Those are the names etched into his Super Cup scars. Cristiano Ronaldo’s double for Real in 2014. A 5-4 extra-time epic against a Lionel Messi-inspired Barcelona in 2015. A penalty shootout defeat to Chelsea with Villarreal in Dublin in 2021. Sevilla even lost another Super Cup to Real in 2016, but by then Emery had already left for PSG.

The Europa League has defined him. The Super Cup has denied him.

A perfectionist who hates loose ends

Last season he set a domestic target that sounded modest for a coach of his ambition: third place in the Premier League. Not a title charge, not a cup double. Third.

He didn’t get it.

Villa finished fourth. For most clubs, a triumph. For Emery, a missed detail that will irritate until corrected. This is how he works. He collects trophies, but he also chases completions, the sense that nothing has been left on the table.

The Super Cup sits in that same category. Is it just a glossy pre-season showpiece, something like the Community Shield that Arsenal and Manchester City contested on Sunday? Or does it actually matter?

To Emery, it is simple. It is a trophy. And trophies are an objective, not a side effect.

He admitted as much when John McGinn, pointing across the room, reminded him about that Chelsea defeat. The Villa captain knows his manager’s memory is long and selective. Lost finals stay with him.

“Of course, it's an opportunity. A trophy is something that can give us a special moment. To play for trophies is, as a professional, our objective,” Emery said, making clear that this is no friendly in his mind.

PSG, he conceded, are favourites. They usually are. But this is the type of stage he relishes: a one-off game against Europe’s elite, a chance to test his side’s “capacity”, as he put it, and to measure how far Villa have travelled under his command.

“As a coach, as a player, as a club, it's a trophy. It's one thing that makes us proud of how we are and how we arrive here.”

A stage for serial winners

If Emery is chasing his first Super Cup, Carlo Ancelotti has turned it into a habit. Five titles – two with AC Milan, three with Real Madrid. Pep Guardiola sits just behind on four, spread across Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City.

Ancelotti’s third came at Emery’s expense in 2014, when Real beat Sevilla. The competition may look like a curtain-raiser, but the names who dominate it do not treat it lightly.

Neither do PSG. Vitinha, a four-time Ligue 1 champion, brushed aside any notion that the French giants see this as a glorified warm-up, even if he admitted their “pre-season was a little short”.

“We're still hungry for victories, trophies. It's very difficult to maintain those levels but we're still hungry,” the Portugal midfielder said.

Marquinhos struck the same note. PSG, fresh from back-to-back Champions League titles, arrived in Salzburg irritated by the size of their dressing room, forcing Uefa to find them an extra one. That small detail underlined their status: this is a club used to being treated as royalty, and one that expects to keep lifting silverware.

“Just because we've won things these past seasons, that doesn't mean it's easy. We know there'll be plenty of obstacles,” the defender said. “Personally, I want more, and each player in the squad is like that. We've all worked to get here, to arrive in the best condition.”

Echoes of a quarter-final that changed perceptions

This is not a new duel. The Super Cup brings back the memory of their Champions League quarter-final in the 2024-25 season, a tie that altered how Europe viewed Aston Villa.

At Parc des Princes, PSG did what PSG do. They won 3-1 and looked comfortable. In Birmingham, they surged 2-0 ahead, 5-1 up on aggregate, and the tie seemed buried.

Villa refused to accept it.

They roared back, turned 2-0 down into a 3-2 victory on the night, and pushed PSG to the brink before going out 5-4 on aggregate. They did not go through, but they made a statement: Emery had built a side capable of trading blows with the best in Europe, not just admiring them from a distance.

That second half stuck with PSG. Vitinha admitted as much.

“It was such a difficult test, especially the second half,” he said. “We'll be ready but we're conscious of how difficult it's going to be.”

A new-look Villa, same hard edge

Salzburg will not see a simple rerun of that quarter-final. The Villa team has changed, sharply, in just 484 days.

Morgan Rogers, Lucas Digne and Youri Tielemans have gone. Amadou Onana is sidelined until next year. Boubacar Kamara is back in the squad but only just returning from a serious knee injury suffered in January.

Emi Martinez, Ezri Konsa and Ollie Watkins have not travelled after their World Cup exploits, with Emery granting them a month off. It leaves the prospect that only four of the starters from that night against PSG will begin here. Five of the substitutes from that tie are also no longer at the club.

For a side that has felt so settled under Emery, this is a jolt.

McGinn has lived through the entire transformation.

“A lot has changed in the eight years I've been here,” the skipper said. He has seen Villa go from survival scrappers to Champions League qualifiers, from selling points to a destination for elite young talent.

“When you are signing the best young English talent and players are performing at the highest level there will be interest,” he added. The churn is the price of success.

Yet the core remains. The manager. The methods. The standards that have dragged Villa into the top tier again.

“We have a structure in place, standards and rules which have made us a success. I'm really excited about the new Aston Villa.

“We have our main core, the same manager, same methods and same desire to achieve more. A lot of people thought we reached a ceiling a couple of seasons ago and we proved them wrong.”

Now they walk into a Super Cup final against the European champions, with 6,000 Villa fans heading to Austria and their serial Europa League winner hunting a different kind of history.

Emery has conquered Europe’s second stage. In Salzburg, against his former club and his old ghosts, he goes after the one trophy that keeps saying no.