Aston Villa's Europa League win is just the start, insists Unai Emery

For Aston Villa, the Europa League must only be the beginning, Unai Emery insisted after winning the trophy for a fifth time. Beating Freiburg 3-0 on Wednesday evening brought Villa’s first major piece silverware since the League Cup in 1996, but Emery is determined this should not be the summit of their achievements. He again rejected the tag of “king of the Europa League”, preferring to focus on “now” and, by implication, the future.

“Next year we will play in Champions League and this is the challenge,” the Aston Villa manager said. “The best teams in the world are there and it will challenge us a lot. The Premier League is the most difficult league in the world. To be fighting top seven, top five, top four is something very difficult. Hopefully we can be close with teams like City and Arsenal.

“It’s a huge challenge we have in Premier League. Why? In the beginning we are not contenders for top seven. There are top seven teams. Top six, and Newcastle is the seventh. And we are trying to get there. To try to be consistent there. We are achieving it.”

Winning the Europa League is part of the process. “Play for Europe, play for trophies,” Emery said, explaining the stages of fulfilling the dream he outlined in his introductory press conference as Villa manager. “This is the first one and we are achieving and the experiences we are having is every important in how we can get better.Trophies make sense of what we are doing. We are not going to stop.”

A key part of that process has been the set-piece coach, Austin MacPhee, as exemplified by the move that led to Youri Tielemans finding space to put Villa ahead with a ferocious volley. John McGinn, the Villa captain, said: “I’m biased, but we have a great set piece coach in Austin MacPhee. We tried to deceive a bit with the set piece. We did it against Liverpool at the weekend. Youri has great quality to find the goal. It’d have been over the bar if it were me!”

Emery called MacPhee “a really fantastic creator. We must be so, so demanding in our details. Austin is fantastic. Everything we are working on makes sense. The hours in each training session each day to try to get as best as possible our challenges in set pieces. When we are scoring like that of course we are proud of what we’re doing.”