Aston Villa vs Nottingham Forest: Emery Faces Unbeaten Glasner
Four days after igniting their Champions League campaign against Club Brugge, Aston Villa return to Villa Park with a different kind of test: a domestic reboot against a Nottingham Forest side still searching for their first league win and their new identity.
Villa’s identity returns – but the goals must follow
Villa’s start has carried an uncomfortable echo of last season. Back then, they stumbled through four goalless league games before a scrappy European win against modest opposition suddenly flipped the script. What followed was extraordinary: 17 wins in 19 matches and a surge that reshaped their season.
This time, the alarm bells are ringing for different reasons. The opening-day collapse against Brighton was abysmal, but the broader picture is less bleak. Under Unai Emery, the early-season fog that clouded 2025-26 has cleared more quickly. Villa look like a team with a plan.
The defensive structure, shredded on that first weekend, has tightened. Lines are cleaner, distances shorter, mistakes rarer. The back line, which looked porous and panicked, now moves with a purpose that bears Emery’s fingerprints all over it.
Higher up the pitch, the gears are starting to mesh. The improvement had been gradual, then Club Brugge arrived on Tuesday and the tempo changed. The ball moved quicker, the combinations were sharper, and Villa finally resembled a side that expects to hurt opponents rather than merely contain them.
And there is more firepower to come.
Ibrahim Mbaye, one of the headline arrivals of the summer, is still waiting for his first Premier League minutes. So is Johan Manzambi, fresh from being named Ballon d'Or Young Talent of the Year nominee and carrying the weight of that label into a new dressing room. Both could step onto the Villa Park turf for the first time in claret and blue on Saturday.
Their timing matters. Villa are one bad afternoon away from an unwanted slice of history: they are trying to avoid becoming the first club in English league football ever to start two consecutive seasons without a goal in their opening four games. For a side with Champions League ambitions and significant summer investment, that would sting.
What they do have is home comfort against this particular opponent. Villa have strung together six straight Premier League home wins over Forest and dismantled them 4-0 only four months ago on this ground to book a place in the Europa League final. That night felt like a statement of power and depth.
Yet that team has been ripped apart at speed. Six of the starting XI from that semi-final and nine of the 16 players used are no longer at the club. The badge remains the same, the stadium unchanged, but the squad is in flux. Emery is effectively building a new side on the fly, one that must find its voice quickly if this season is to follow the pattern of the last.
Glasner, the manager Villa cannot crack
On paper, Forest look like ideal visitors for a team trying to accelerate through the gears. They have not beaten Aston Villa away from home since 1994. They come into the weekend without a win from their first three Premier League games, a start as flat as the mood around their early performances.
Yet the man in their dugout changes the equation.
Oliver Glasner has become a problem Aston Villa cannot solve and Unai Emery cannot shake. The Austrian arrives in the Midlands with a perfect record against both club and coach, a streak that borders on the bizarre.
Seven meetings. No defeats. An aggregate score of 19-4 in Glasner’s favour. All of it compiled while he was in charge of Crystal Palace, all of it built on game plans that repeatedly picked holes in Emery’s structure and exposed Villa’s vulnerabilities.
Twice he walked into Villa Park during a remarkable 41-match home run in which the hosts swatted away almost everyone else. Twice he walked out with victories. In a fortress, he found the side door and slipped through it.
For Glasner, this is more than a curious footnote. He has only once put together a longer unbeaten run against any manager, and he has never enjoyed a better record against a counterpart without a single defeat on the ledger. For Emery, it is the longest such drought of his career against another coach – a blind spot he has not yet corrected.
So while Forest arrive winless and under pressure, their manager has every reason to treat this as an opportunity rather than a damage-limitation exercise. The history is his ally. The psychology, too. He knows how to set up a team to trouble Villa. He has done it with a different squad, in a different shirt, in this very stadium.
Villa, for all their recent European lift and for all the optimism around Mbaye, Manzambi and Emery’s rebuilt structure, still have a question to answer. Can they finally break the grip of a coach who has turned them into one of his favourite fixtures?
The numbers frame the contest starkly. A club trying to outrun a grim goalscoring record. A manager trying to shake off the one opponent he cannot beat. A visitor without a win, but with a blueprint that has repeatedly worked on this ground.
Villa Park has seen Emery’s revolution, Forest’s suffering and Glasner’s quiet dominance. On Saturday, one of those stories has to bend.
