There was a flurry of activity to start July, as Aston Villa officially confirmed three new signings in Enzo Barrenechea, Samuel Iling-Junior and Ross Barkley.
It’s been a busy summer already, as we’ve seen Douglas Luiz, Tim Iroegbunam and Omari Kellyman depart, while both Nicolo Zaniolo and Clement Lenglet have seen their respective loan spells come to an end.
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In come Barrenechea, Iling-Junior, Barkley, Ian Maatsen and Lewis Dobbin, as we watch on at a critical point in Unai Emery’s push to continue to mould this squad into his own and not only improve us, but make us more adaptable to his demands.
As expectations and ambitions continue to rise, it’s imperative that the quality level of the squad continues to match that, but equally as important for Emery is having the players capable of adapting to his ideas and style of play, as well as having the tactical maturity and versatility to play the roles required.
Each of our new recruits thus far have shown their ability to do that at their previous clubs, or they have the talent and potential to develop under the Villa boss and take their game to the next level.
What became apparent last season was that Emery wanted to play with possession and control in both phases of the game. With that comes the need for technical ability, composure and positional awareness to make it as difficult for the opposition as possible to not only break us down, but to stop our dynamic attacking patterns.
Those available to him last season carried those instructions out brilliantly to earn us a top-four finish in the Premier League, but to now sustain and build on that and be competitive in the Champions League requires further improvement and evolution, and that is hopefully what we’ll see with our new signings.
What we’re also seeing in our new additions is more physicality, speed, athleticism and agility to play the way Emery wants us to play, and particularly after our vulnerability was exposed last season with our lack of height in the side, that is something that we’ve been keen to address too it seems.
Further, in order to control games, we must also be able to impose ourselves on the opposition, and so these additions are astute and targeted, and it will hopefully ensure that it allows Emery to more effectively implement the brand of football that he wants to see, which will be a successful style in this era of the game.
Time will tell if more reinforcements arrive, but there is a feeling that having essentially filled out the squad for the most part with these new faces, barring Maatsen, we could yet see more marquee arrivals between now and the end of the transfer window as Villa look to address as many of Emery’s needs as possible ahead of a big season.
