Aston Villa has been running alongside my life for more than fifty-four years, appearing in fathers and brothers, mothers, uncles, aunts and cousins and children, railway stations, pubs, campsites, cigarettes, marriages, divorces and different countries.
Daley, Platty and Allan McInally. Brian Little. Ray Graydon. Chico Hamilton. Alex Cropley. Andy Gray. Chris Nicholl. Dennis Mortimer. Gary Shaw. Des Bremner. Peter Withe. Jimmy Rimmer. Shaun Teale. Paul McGrath. Savo Milošević. Mingsy. McGinn. Marvellous Nakamba.
Ron Saunders. Big Ron. Dean Smith. Unai Emery.
I can tell the story through ten matches. Not the ten greatest matches Aston Villa ever played. Not even the ten most important.
Ten I remember.
1. Villa Park, sometime around 1972
I was four, perhaps five. My dad had my brother, my cousins and me in the back of the Land Rover driving through Birmingham on a Saturday afternoon. We came up around Spaghetti Junction and Villa Park appeared in the distance.
“Ah,” my dad said, or at least this is how I remember it. “Let’s go and have a look.”
And we did.
We arrived late, perhaps half an hour before the end. In those days you could turn up at one of the great football grounds of England with a Land Rover full of children and simply be let in. We were lifted over the great metal turnstiles at the Holte End and taken up towards the back.
I think Villa were playing Blackpool. I remember orange shirts. It may have been Bournemouth.
Memory is not a fixture list.
What I remember is the light.
The enormous green rectangle below us. Mud around the goals. Claret and blue. The terraces. The impossible size of the place.
Charlie Aitken. Andy Lochhead. Jimmy Cumbes.
Villa were in the Third Division, I think. Or the second. Whichever it was magnificent. 30,000 of us.
2. Highbury, 1977
By now my dad had moved to London. The family had rearranged itself.
Pat queued around Highbury to get tickets for us for Villa’s League Cup semi-final replay against Queens Park Rangers.
We sat in one of the Arsenal stands along the side of the pitch. I remember Frank McLintock trying to break Alex Cropley’s fragile legs. I remember Brian Little.
Mostly I remember Brian Little.
He scored all three as Villa won 3–0.
There are footballers you admire and footballers who enter your mythology. Brian Little was already in the second category.
3. Everton, Wembley, Hillsborough, Old Trafford, 1977
Then Wembley.
I was nine and it was terrifying. The sheer noise.
Villa and Everton drew 0–0. Then they played again at Hillsborough and drew again.
By the time of the second replay we were staying on a campsite in the Peak District, underneath a huge railway viaduct. Somehow we found out what had happened.
Villa had won 3–2 at Old Trafford.
Chris Nicholl had scored from a different postcode.
Brian Little scored the winner.
I think this is when the love affair became irreversible.
4. Highbury, May 1981
Villa won the league by losing 2–0. That seems appropriately Villa.
I went to an absurd number of the defeats that season. Ipswich home and away. Tottenham. London games. Even Brighton.
Then the final afternoon.
My dad and I were on the North Bank at Highbury as Arsenal beat us. At the other end the Villa supporters gradually discovered that Ipswich were losing at Middlesbrough.
Suddenly we were champions of England.
We stood among Arsenal supporters.
Ron Saunders had been asked earlier in the season whether Ipswich were going to catch Villa.
“Do you want to bet against us?”
No.
5. Rotterdam, 26 May 1982
Bayern Munich.
I was fourteen.
Nigel Spink. Gordon Cowans. Dennis Mortimer. Gary Shaw. Des Bremner.
Peter Withe.
Off the shin.
1–0.
Champions of Europe.
My brother had been to Leningrad and somehow returned with Russian cigarettes. There was champagne and Guinness with my dad. We telephoned our grandparents.
I went to school the next morning with a hangover.
Fourteen years old.
Worth it.
6. Everton, 1989
There had been a break.
Villa were relegated. For one season I almost stopped caring. I wasn’t even particularly upset, which seemed impossible.
Then they came back.
David Platt. Allan McInally. Gordon Cowans again.
On a Sunday afternoon my cousin and I watched Villa beat Everton 6–2 on television.
There weren’t hundreds of live matches then. A live Villa game felt like an event.
Something restarted.
The following spring Villa nearly became champions again.
7. Liverpool, Villa Park, 1992
Big Ron.
The Holte End.
Liverpool in green.
Ronny Rosenthal somehow putting the ball over an open goal.
There are sophisticated pleasures in life.
Watching Liverpool get destroyed from the Holte End is not one of them.
It is better.
8. Leeds, Wembley, 1996
Old Wembley again.
Dark, strange, enormous. Our seats seemed to be below the level of the pitch.
Savo Milošević hit one from miles out.
3–0.
League Cup winners.
And oddly, I don’t remember being ecstatic. I remember being happy in the complacent way of someone who assumed this was simply what Aston Villa did.
Every few years Villa would win something.
Of course we would.
They didn’t win another major trophy for thirty years.
9. Paris Saint-Germain, Villa Park, 2025
By now I was living in Warsaw. Children of my own.
Villa were back in the European Cup, the Champions League now, and Paris Saint-Germain arrived at Villa Park with what looked like an unassailable advantage.
Then Villa went 2–0 down on the night.
And something happened.
Tielemans.
McGinn.
Konsa happened.
3–2.
We went out of the competition, 5–4 on aggregate.
But for twenty or thirty minutes we had seen the Aston Villa of childhood again: unreasonable, furious, magnificent.
Unbeatable.
10. Freiburg, Istanbul, 2026
And then, somehow, there was another European final.
Forty-four years after Rotterdam.
This time I wasn’t fourteen, drinking Guinness and smoking Russian cigarettes with my dad.
I was in Warsaw with my own children.
That season we watched Villa wherever we could. Often in a Turkish bar. My kids allowed to stay up ridiculously late, eating fried chicken while Aston Villa travelled around Europe.
They learnt the names.
McGinn. Mings. Martínez. Watkins. Rogers. Tielemans.
Emery.
And on 20 May 2026, in Istanbul, Aston Villa beat Freiburg 3–0 to win the Europa League our first European trophy since Rotterdam. Tielemans, Buendía and Rogers.
I watched it with my boys.
Fifty-four years and thousands of miles, and somehow the same claret and blue shirts moving across the same green rectangle.
The new season starts this weekend.
I will watch.
Of course I will.
Because football changes. Players leave. Managers sacked. Grounds rebuilt. Children grow up. Countries change. We move away. We come back. Sometimes we stop caring for a while.
And then somebody scores.
And there you are again.
Aston Villa.
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