Aston Villa vs Nottingham Forest: Emery Faces Old Foe

Four days after jolting their season into life in Europe, Aston Villa walk back out at Villa Park with a familiar mix of optimism and unease. The Champions League win over Club Brugge offered a glimpse of the side Unai Emery wants them to be. Nottingham Forest, winless and still feeling their way into a new era under Oliver Glasner, arrive as underdogs on paper.

History says this fixture belongs to Villa. Recent history says Emery should be worried.

Villa’s second attempt at a spark

Villa have been here before. A stuttering start, questions over Emery’s plan, a sense that all the pre-season noise might have been misplaced. Last season they didn’t score a league goal until their fifth match, only to use a scruffy but vital European victory as the launchpad for one of the great surges of the modern Premier League: 17 wins in 19 games, momentum roaring through the dressing room.

This year’s script is similar, but not identical. The opening-day collapse against Brighton was abysmal, a performance stripped of control and composure. Since then, though, Villa have at least looked like a team with a clear idea of who they want to be.

Emery has tightened the back line with his usual precision. The chaos that marked the early weeks of 2025-26 has given way to a more disciplined structure, distances between defenders reduced, lines compacted, the risk-taking more calculated. The attack has taken longer to catch fire, but the Brugge game on Tuesday felt like a jolt of electricity through a system that had been flickering.

There is still more to come. A lot more, if the club’s summer spending is any indication. Ibrahim Mbaye, one of the headline arrivals, has yet to be fully unleashed. So has Johan Manzambi, the Ballon d'Or Young Talent of the Year nominee whose signing signalled Villa’s ambition to move beyond plucky overachievers and into the company of clubs that expect to be in Europe every year.

Both could make their debuts on Saturday. Their timing matters. Villa are one match away from an unwanted slice of history: no team has ever started back-to-back English league seasons by failing to score in their first four games. For all the talk of structures and identity, that statistic would cut through everything.

A fortress with new faces

Villa Park has not been kind to Nottingham Forest in the Premier League era. Six straight home league wins for Villa in this fixture tell their own story. When the sides last met here, in Europe four months ago, Villa tore Forest apart 4-0 on their way to the Europa League final. It felt like a statement of superiority, the sort of one-sided contest that lodges in the memory of both sets of players.

Yet look at the team sheet from that night and the picture blurs. Six of Villa’s starting XI in that semi-final, and nine of the 16 players used, have since left the club. The crowd, the colours, the manager remain the same. The dressing room does not. Emery is effectively trying to rebuild a contender on the fly, asking a new group to replicate the ruthlessness of a side that no longer exists.

That makes this run of home dominance over Forest feel slightly more fragile than it appears on paper. The badge carries the history. The squad has to prove it all over again.

Glasner’s hold over Emery

For Oliver Glasner, this trip to the Midlands might be arriving at exactly the right time. Forest have not won away at Villa since 1994 and they come into the game without a victory in their opening three Premier League matches, something they have never previously endured. Under normal circumstances, Villa Park would hardly be the ideal place to correct a poor start.

These are not normal circumstances. Glasner is, quite simply, Emery’s worst nightmare.

While in charge of Crystal Palace, the Austrian faced Emery seven times. He did not lose once. The aggregate scoreline across those meetings reads 19-4 in Glasner’s favour, a brutal, lopsided record that cuts against Emery’s reputation as one of Europe’s elite problem-solvers.

Two of those wins came at Villa Park during a remarkable 41-match home stretch in which Villa were otherwise unbeaten. In a stadium that had turned into a fortress, Glasner walked in twice and found a way to break down the walls.

The numbers are not a quirk. Glasner has only ever put together one longer unbeaten run against a single manager, and he has never enjoyed a better record against any counterpart without tasting defeat. For Emery, this is the longest winless sequence he has endured against another coach.

Managers feel those patterns. Players do too. When a fixture keeps going the same way, it hangs in the air before kick-off, it shapes the questions in press conferences, it slips into the back of a defender’s mind when a familiar pattern of play unfolds in front of him.

So Villa arrive with a European win behind them, a renewed defensive base, and the promise of marquee signings ready to step in. Forest arrive with no league victory, a miserable record at this ground, and a manager who has never found Emery anything other than beatable.

Something has to give.