Aston Villa's rebirth – and what I learned from writing a book about it

New York Times

16-07-2025

'When we met Nassef Sawiris in Madrid, he was a little bit sick,' says Aston Villa's director of football operations, Damian Vidagany, as he recalls how the club's executive chairman convinced Unai Emery to join as manager in 2022.
'His wife told him to stay at home but he insisted on holding the meeting because it was about the future of Aston Villa. Nassef was very clever in this meeting because he explained what the club was, the aims and how he would be investing. Then he said to Unai about a blank piece of paper: 'This is what I want, fill this paper and build me the club you have in mind'. The approach from Nassef was perfect.'
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This meeting brought together two of the most important people in Aston Villa's recent history, and who ended up being central characters in my book Waking the Giant, which reveals how the club was revived and is published on Thursday.
Sawiris is the leading force at the club, the man who — alongside co-owner, Wes Edens — was inspirational in saving Villa from financial ruin in 2018. Emery, meanwhile, is the mastermind manager who added elite-level coaching to the structure and was given the freedom to redesign the football department with his own people. Without them Villa's journey from the Championship to the Champions League would not have been possible.
Yet the adventure has taken many other twists and turns, and as the Villa reporter for The Athletic between 2019 and 2024, and before that for the local Birmingham Mail newspaper, it felt like a good time to pull it all together alongside Matt Maher, who works for another local paper, the Express & Star.
So what did I learn from writing the book?
First, that it is Sawiris and Edens, both ambitious and hugely wealthy individuals, who have set the tone ever since they first walked through the doors of Villa's Bodymoor Heath training ground.
Qualifying for the Champions League was their dream, spelled out in their first meeting with supporters, at a time when the very notion appeared pure fantasy following the mismanagement under former owner Tony Xia.
It is their determination, and most crucially their continued financial backing, which has also made it possible, and if Profit and Sustainability rules (PSR) feel relevant now, then be assured Sawiris and Edens, who were previously supported by the savvy Christian Purslow during his time as CEO, were thinking outside the box right from the start.
There's a chapter dedicated to this in order to explain why selling Villa Park back to a subsidiary company controlled by the owners was a vital move in 2019 and how, ironically, it was bitter rivals Birmingham City who provided assistance in helping Villa balance their books just weeks after promotion was secured.
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Like any sporting success story, it has also required a different kind of fortune; the fates conspiring when a big decision needed to be made. None more so than when former Arsenal and France striker Thierry Henry turned down the head coach's job in 2018, paving the way for the appointment of boyhood supporter Dean Smith, who would lead the club to promotion and consolidation back in the Premier League.
That's one of the more well-known topics, but it was the deeper conversations with players and staff, both past and present, that unearthed so much more.
Tyrone Mings, for example, explains how close he came to joining Villa's local rivals, West Bromwich Albion, and Jed Steer reveals he nearly left the club completely, eight months before he was the hero in a crucial penalty shoot-out win which helped alter the course of club history.
There are stories about Prince William's visits to the club and inside details about transfer deals and failed pursuits. Would James Milner returning to Villa have helped Steven Gerrard, for example?
Jack Grealish also opens up candidly about his reasons for leaving his boyhood club and joining Manchester City while captain John McGinn explains in detail how he was almost forced into a move away.
'I am not saying it had anything to do with Steven Gerrard, either, but the club were looking to see if anyone was interested,' McGinn says in the book. 'I did have a lot of interest at that time, several clubs but probably West Ham mostly at that point. There was a chance I could be away. It was a bit strange. I had prepared myself for leaving and as a footballer you get used to these things because sometimes you have to get used to moving on.'
Perhaps the most revealing conversations were with the former owner Tony Xia, who was in charge when Villa were threatened with a winding-up order after failing to pay a tax bill in 2018. Xia sold the club to Sawiris and Edens and was last seen by anyone connected to Villa at Wembley in 2019 when he sat in the stands watching the play-off final win over Derby County as a spectator, a year after the club lost to Fulham at the same stage.
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Although still the co-chairman at that point, he was no longer a person of significant control after failing to match the cash injections made by Sawiris and Edens, but letting go of the connection with the club was difficult for him.
After tracking Xia down, it is revealed in the book that weeks after Villa had secured promotion, he submitted a written offer to buy the club back from Sawiris and Edens. The Chinese businessman also describes what happened in the years after Villa, including six months spent in a detention centre in China.
For Villa to recover from such a turbulent period under his control and rebuild so quickly was remarkable in many ways. Purslow was a figure at the centre of most of it and he discusses his five years at the club for the first time since his exit, including the process of hiring and firing managers and rebuilding the club so it was equipped for the future.
'The regime prior to our regime had bet everything on getting promoted and betting everything in football terms means retaining a high wage bill when turnover has dropped dramatically,' he says. 'It was literally a formula that means if you lose the play-off final you will be filing for administration unless you are rescued. And that is the story of Aston Villa in one sentence.'
It's Purslow's take on the mess he inherited when he first joined that highlights the magnitude of the transformation and everything that has since happened with Emery at the helm and Villa competing in Europe.
'Nassef and Wes' willingness to step in and fund the club through that period saved it because it would have been bankrupted, liquidated, finished,' Purslow adds. 'It was truly a rescue takeover.'
Every journalist craves a good story and at Villa there have been plenty.