Ezri Konsa says he would have laughed in September if someone had told him Aston Villa would get back into the Champions League and play the Europa League final. In a first-person reflection for The Players’ Tribune, the Villa defender traces a season that began with one goal in the first five league games and ended with the club back among Europe’s elite.
It is a sharp turnaround from the start he described. Villa did not win any of those first five league matches, were in the relegation zone after five games and were still settling into a campaign that had already gone wrong on the final day of the previous season, when they missed out on Champions League qualification and Morgan had a goal disallowed at Old Trafford. Konsa said the summer did not bring the squad strengthening Unai Emery wanted, and the manager reacted to the slow start by calling the players into a meeting after what Konsa described as a very concerned tone.
Konsa said Emery had never used that word in three years, a detail that underlined how worried the manager was at that moment. The warning came after Villa were held in their first home game of the season, when Konsa was sent off and the match ended in a draw, before defeats to Brentford and Palace and two points taken from games against Everton and Sunderland. In the Sunderland match, Villa led 1-0 and had a man advantage before conceding a late equaliser, a result that summed up how fragile the early weeks felt.
That is what makes the recovery so striking. Konsa said he fully believed in the squad before the Bologna game, and there was no massive team meeting or pep talk before Villa beat Bologna. Instead, he said the belief had to come from inside the group. In the days before that match, he told reporters: “I fully believe in this squad. Once it clicks, we’re gonna fly.” It was not an empty line. Villa went on to win 11 matches in a row, turning a bad opening into a run that changed the shape of the season.
By the end of December, the table had become the proof. Arsenal were on 42 points, Manchester City had 40 and Villa had 39, a position that would have seemed unthinkable when Emery was gathering his players for that early meeting. Konsa said the group talked about the standings in small groups rather than as one team, and he added that Emery only looks at the table near the end of the season. That restraint fitted a manager who had seen enough early chaos to know the season would be decided later, not in September.
For Villa, the story is no longer just about the poor start or the missed chance from the previous spring. It is about how quickly a team can be written off, then reset. Konsa’s account makes clear that the recovery was not the product of one speech or one result, but of a squad that stayed together long enough for the season to swing back in its favour. The next test now is whether that belief can survive beyond one remarkable run and into the demands that come with it.
