On Sunday afternoon, shortly before 4.30, Unai Emery will leave the tunnel at Old Trafford and walk along the touchline towards the bench. Will he glance around the grand old stadium – faded and leaking though it may be in parts – and think that he could have a part in restoring the club to former glories? Will he look at the home bench and imagine himself sitting there – or perhaps more plausibly, scuttling up and down in front of it – as the first Manchester United manager since Sir Alex Ferguson to land a league title?
Perhaps not. Emery is, after all, in "advanced talks" to extend a contract at Villa that already runs to 2029. However frustrating he may find the habitual summer churn, he is good at managing it. He feels the right fit for Villa, and that is arguably the most important factor in determining success. Yet all elite managers share a robust self-belief and there is a paradoxical sense that the worse the situation gets at United, the more appealing the job becomes.
Imagine being the manager who does sort it out. Imagine following in that brief lineage of United title winners: Ernest Mangnall, Matt Busby, Alex Ferguson … me? United remain the eighth wealthiest club by revenue in the world; imagine the resources that would be available if they were actually any good.
That is an allure that very few clubs in the world can match, no matter how good they were in the 1890s, and no matter how much the Villa owner, Nassef Sawiris, may dislike the fact. This is a point that cannot be made too strongly. Villa's threat of legal action against Jamie Carragher was an outrageous attack on free speech. There is no way Carragher's comment about the food chain of football could be construed as defamatory and, while it's true he might have made the comment in less provocative terms, swearing is not a crime. This was a classic case of a legal threat being used to quell criticism and those fans – and, worse, journalists – who cheered it on should be thoroughly ashamed. The partisan blindness and persecution complex shared by fans of so many clubs is one of the most depressing features of the modern game.
But it's also true United's allure has come to look distinctly tarnished. No matter how bullet-proof a manager's self-confidence, it would represent a remarkable risk to make the leap from Villa to United at this juncture. In almost every facet, from infrastructure to personnel, the modern Villa are better run than the modern United. And from Emery's point of view, it's not just that Villa are well run, it's that they're well run in his way.
He has the coaching staff he wants, while the president of football operations, Roberto Olabe, and the director of football operations, Damian Vidagany, are people he trusts and has worked with before. Emery would not have the degree of autonomy he has at Villa at many other clubs. United's win over Roma on Tuesday may have eased the most immediate pressure on Michael Carrick, but nobody surely thinks that one good half against a depleted Serie A side cures all ills. (The question, obviously, is slightly absurd: nobody surely thinks Carrick is really the problem at United; it's just that executives tend to get rid of managers because it's what you do when there's been a slump in form; it's how a director acknowledges that he's recognised there is a problem, while hoping desperately to deflect attention from his own shortcomings).
It doesn't help that there is a clear precedent from five years ago, when a popular former United player saw his team come from two down to beat a Serie A side managed by Gian Piero Gasperini; Ole Gunnar Solskjær was sacked a month later.
The United crisis may have eased, but it is far from over. While Sir Jim Ratcliffe shows off architects' plans and begs for public money to build a new stadium, Villa get on with building the new Trinity Road Stand. While United's squad sags under the weight of its many contradictions, a weird mismatch of ill-fitting parts, Villa's begins to take shape despite making 11 signings in the summer – even if the 3-0 defeat by Barcelona in midweek suggests there is still work to be done. They probably wouldn't ideally have made such radical changes and would have preferred to keep Morgan Rogers and Ezri Konsa but, equally, there was an admirable sense of realism at Villa – a recognition of their place in the food chain, you might say – that when Chelsea or Arsenal come calling and offering huge contracts, there's not much to be done other than to drive the price as high as possible.
Youri Tielemans is another player Villa might have liked to keep, but once United matched his release clause, the deal was done. Although Tielemans probably appreciates his new contract, it's far from clear it's been a good move for him from a football point of view, not least because United's is a midfield that exposes his lack of mobility. Carlos Baleba was signed from Brighton to address that lack of dynamism in the United midfield but there were concerns about his tendency to drift in and out of games even before he suffered a hamstring injury on Tuesday.
It even feels as though Villa have been smarter about using United players than United have. Victor Lindelöf was brought in on a free transfer in summer 2025 and has excelled since and while Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho had less of an impact, Villa only signed them on loan. Rashford's time, which featured four goals in 17 appearances in all competitions, was probably the more eye-catching, but Sancho made 39 appearances in his season at Villa.
In both cases, Villa got value out of a players whose futures were uncertain but without committing to having to take them on full-time.
It's pretty hard to imagine at the moment, but at some point, United will start heading in the right direction. It may even be that Tuesday's win prompts a surge of adrenaline that takes them into the top half of the table. For now, though, Villa look by far the brighter prospect, a club on the up, while United are in barely managed decline.
