Unai Emery's Quest for the Elusive Super Cup
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 Villa trophy drought finally cracked.
Yet the Super Cup keeps turning him away at the door.
On Wednesday in Salzburg, at Red Bull Arena, he goes back to that door again. Same manager, new club, old obsession. Aston Villa against Paris St-Germain, the Champions League winners. Emery’s fourth shot at a prize that refuses to join his collection.
He has been here before, and the scars are specific. Real Madrid. Barcelona. Chelsea. Cristiano Ronaldo deciding one, Lionel Messi another. A penalty shootout lost to Chelsea in Dublin with Villarreal in 2021. A 5-4 extra-time epic against Barcelona in 2015, a year after Ronaldo’s double for Madrid. Sevilla even lost another Super Cup to Real in 2016, by which time Emery had already gone to PSG.
The pattern is obvious. For a coach who lives on detail and control, the Super Cup has been chaos.
Now he faces his former club, with 6,000 Villa supporters heading to Austria, and another chance to snap the streak.
Emery did not try to hide how much it matters.
John McGinn, sat alongside him, had been teasing him about the Chelsea defeat. Emery admitted it. This is an opportunity. A trophy. Something to frame a career already crowded with silver, yet still restless.
“To play for trophies is, as a professional, our objective,” he said. PSG are the favourites, he knows that, but the question that drives him is different: how can Villa test themselves against this PSG, with this capacity, in this moment?
For him, for his players, for the club, it is not a pre-season exercise. It is a statement.
Does the Super Cup really matter?
The argument swirls around this game every year. Is it a dressed-up friendly with a shiny medal, or a genuine piece of a club’s history?
Carlo Ancelotti has treated it like a serious habit. Five Super Cups – two with AC Milan, three with Real Madrid. Pep Guardiola sits one behind with four, spread across Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City. Ancelotti’s third came in 2014, when Real beat Emery’s Sevilla.
The elite managers collect it. They do not shrug it off.
PSG are saying the right things as well. Vitinha, with four Ligue 1 titles behind him, brushed aside the idea that a back-to-back Champions League winner might treat this as a soft launch to the season. He did admit their pre-season “was a little short”, but the hunger, he insisted, has not dulled.
“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 tone. PSG, he argued, cannot afford to act like a team that has had its fill. The club even made their feelings clear off the pitch, unhappy with the size of their dressing room at Red Bull Arena and handed an extra one by Uefa. Details, but revealing ones.
“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.”
This is not a team coming to Salzburg for a gentle run-out. Nor is Emery.
Echoes of a wild quarter-final
This is not just a Super Cup. It is a rerun of one of last season’s most chaotic ties.
Villa and PSG met in the Champions League quarter-final in 2024-25. On paper, it looked straightforward. In reality, it became a test of nerve and identity for both clubs.
PSG took a 3-1 lead from the first leg at Parc des Princes. Back in Birmingham, they surged 2-0 ahead and 5-1 up on aggregate. At that point, most sides fold. Villa did not.
They roared back. Three goals, a 3-2 win on the night, and a 5-4 exit on aggregate that felt, in its own way, like a declaration. Under Emery, Aston Villa were no longer a plucky outsider. They could go toe-to-toe with the giants and make them sweat.
Vitinha has not forgotten it.
“It was such a difficult test, especially the second half,” he said. PSG will be ready, he promised, but they are under no illusions about the threat.
The memory of that second half lingers for Villa as well. It was one of the clearest signs of what Emery has built in Birmingham: organisation, belief, a refusal to accept the script.
A very different Villa, same demanding manager
Yet the Villa that walks out in Austria will not look much like the one that terrified PSG 484 days ago.
Morgan Rogers, Lucas Digne and Youri Tielemans have gone. Amadou Onana is sidelined until next year. Boubacar Kamara is back in the squad after a serious knee injury suffered in January, but only just returning.
The spine that carried Villa deep into Europe and into the Premier League’s top four has been stretched and reshaped.
Emi Martinez, Ezri Konsa and Ollie Watkins have not travelled after their World Cup exertions, Emery granting them a month off. That opens the possibility that only four of the starters from that quarter-final will begin this Super Cup. Five of the substitutes from that night are no longer at the club.
For a side that has felt so settled and consistent under Emery, this is a sharp turn.
McGinn, now the standard-bearer of the Emery era, has lived through the transformation.
“A lot has changed in the eight years I've been here,” the captain said. When a club starts signing the best young English talent and pushing players into the highest level, interest follows. Departures follow.
Villa, he argued, are ready for it. There is a structure, standards, rules. Those have underpinned their rise. He spoke of being “really excited about the new Aston Villa”, a line that could sound like spin if it were not backed by the last two seasons.
The core remains. The manager. The methods. The demand to keep climbing. McGinn knows plenty thought Villa had hit a ceiling a couple of seasons ago. The league table and that night against PSG said otherwise.
The trophy that fits the obsession
Emery is wired for these nights. Last season he openly set third place in the Premier League as his target, simply because he had not yet done it with Villa. They finished fourth. For most clubs, that would be a triumph. For him, it will have nagged.
The Super Cup sits in the same space. Some will call it a glamour friendly with a medal. For Emery, it is unfinished business, a gap on a shelf that otherwise groans with European success.
He has been knocked back by Ronaldo, Messi, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Chelsea. Now he faces PSG, the club that once employed him, with a reshaped squad and a fanbase travelling in force.
If he finally lifts this trophy in Salzburg, it will not just be another line on an already remarkable CV. It will be proof that Aston Villa’s resurgence is not a fleeting surge, but a new reality that even Europe’s aristocracy must take seriously.
