Ezri Konsa says Aston Villa would have laughed in September if anyone had told them they would end up back in the Champions League and playing a Europa League final. That was how far the season had to turn before it felt believable again. The defender’s first-person account of Villa’s campaign, written for The Players’ Tribune, traces the path from panic to momentum and then to a finish that looked impossible when it began.
The scale of the slump was stark. Villa scored just one goal in their first five league games and did not win any of them, with their opening stretch leaving them in the relegation zone after five matches. Konsa said Unai Emery called the players in for a meeting during that spell, and he noted that Emery had never used the word he chose in that talk in three years at the club. For a side that had come within reach of the Champions League the season before, the collapse felt brutal. On the final day of last season, Villa missed out on the competition after Morgan had a goal disallowed at Old Trafford.
The new campaign started badly enough to deepen the concern. Konsa was sent off in Villa’s first game at Villa Park, and the team still had to settle for a draw. Brentford and Palace then beat them, while Everton and Sunderland left them with only two points from their first five league games. By that point, Emery was trying to steady a team that looked nothing like the side he wanted to build, and Konsa said Villa had not been able to strengthen in the summer as the manager wanted.
What changed came after the Bologna game, and it changed fast. Before that match, Konsa gave a press conference and said: “I fully believe in this squad. Once it clicks, we’re gonna fly.” Villa then beat Bologna and began to improve. A few months later, they put together 11 wins in a row, and Konsa said the feeling inside the team changed with it. They were no longer hoping to scrape through matches. They were lining up knowing they were going to win.
By the end of December, the numbers told the story as clearly as the results did. Arsenal had 42 points, Manchester City had 40 and Villa sat on 39, a position that would have sounded fanciful during the early weeks of the season. That is what makes Konsa’s account land so sharply: it is not just a tale of recovery, but of how quickly a team can move from crisis to belief when the manager’s message finally takes hold and the players start to answer it.
