Aston Villa are rewriting the rules under Unai Emery this season. After a historically bad start, they’re three points off the top of the table after 16 matches, and that’s just the beginning of one of the Premier League’s most peculiar title tilts.
Villa are conceding the first goal and winning. They’ve piled up 12 points in their last five away matches by that method alone. They’re playing in Europe on Thursdays and winning on Sundays, a code they were previously unable to crack.
Aston Villa and the rise of Unsustainable FC
There’s a lag in the conversation now. Villa’s reliance on taking low-percentage chances has eased in recent weeks and we’re starting to see the emergence of the new, real, Aston Villa.
They’re still unique among the title contenders. Villa haven’t won a major trophy for 30 years and the last time they won the league title was in 1981, when Ron Saunders shaped a team in his image and squeezed from it every drop of potential.
There are echoes of Saunders in Unai Emery’s Villa. They’re in the title race for now, insofar as a title race is really being run in December, purely on the basis of their league position and form.
No team in Europe’s top five leagues can match Villa’s current winning run and that’s the kind of thing that attracts attention. To reach that level after taking 427 minutes and a ton of injury time to even score a goal takes a freakish turnaround.
Villa’s season has been one of problems solved along the way. After a disastrous summer transfer window and an atrocious start, Emery and Villa gradually found their solutions.
Scoring from outside the penalty area was among them, birthing Unsustainable FC by taking Villa’s meagre Expected Goals (xG) value and bypassing it instead of directly addressing it.
Opponents knew that Villa struggled against a low block. It’s a bad habit for a team with a tendency to concede first and anybody who watched those early matches knows just how paralysing it can be.
The obvious answer would be to improve the volume and quality of chances created.
Emery, knowing he doesn’t have all the pieces to achieve that or indeed total control of the board, instead unlocked a statistically unprecedented ability to score from elsewhere. He does have the pieces for that.
Analysts equipped with xG said it was unsustainable, that Villa were getting results now but might slide again, and many Villa supporters got a kick out of taunting their doubters.
Emery and his staff aren’t so dismissive of xG as a probability marker. The plan wasn’t to score the vast majority of goals from outside the box in perpetuity, but for Villa to open up another angle of attack in response to being found out by teams sitting deep.
The sustainability or otherwise of Villa’s approach does matter and, sure enough, the more recent pattern has been a steady increase in expected goals and a glut of actual goals from higher percentage chances.
Villa aren’t getting results by exploding football’s probability model but by understanding what it means and how to read it.
Still, you won’t find many Villa supporters complaining about scoring above expected and having their own goal of the season highlights reel to look forward to in May.
Sunday’s win against West Ham United was pure Villa 2025-26 captured in a bottle and preserved for study by future generations.
They conceded sloppy goals to fall behind away from home and came back to win with a spectacular Morgan Rogers shot from a low xG position in a different postcode than the goal.
Rogers also scored from a shot with a reported xG value as high as 0.46, Villa’s hybrid winning ability writ large.
Their ability to stay near the top of the table is likely to be hindered by key injuries at the back and their lack of an in-form striker but they have at least started to see the close-range benefits of their long-range capabilities.
In FourFourTwo’s opinion, it’s far too early to consider Villa realistic contenders for the Premier League title, not because they’re still in the lower quarter of the division for xG, but because they’re in new territory surrounded by teams with more experience.
If there’s a title race in December, though, we’re past the point of being able to explain away their presence in the top three.
It’s not a fluke. It’s not an accident. It’s not unsustainable because Villa aren’t standing still and assuming they’ve broken the data. Emery is operating at the very top of his game to solve puzzles and find ways to win.
Villa take on Manchester United next. For most teams, that’s now just another game. For Villa, it’s kryptonite – the ultimate test of their reconstructed credentials as legitimate challengers.
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