Oliver Glasner: Unai Emery’s kryptonite

As the old boxing adage goes, styles make fights.

In football, too, every opponent offers a different stylistic match-up. Clearly, after eight matches against Oliver Glasner, Unai Emery’s Aston Villa has a stylistic kryptonite. With Nottingham Forest’s 2-1 victory, Glasner has now won six of their eight meetings — most gallingly for Emery, he lost an FA Cup semi-final to the Austrian’s Crystal Palace side in 2025 — and drawn the other two.

Villa is the club Glasner has faced the most without defeat. Each loss has had the same tactical threads running through them, and for Villa, however much Emery resolves to change fortunes, the defeats continue.

“I spoke to him (Emery) before the match,” Glasner told the media afterwards. “I told him it’s still 5-2 — five European trophies for him, two for me — so I said, ‘Oliver Glasner, stay humble’.”

Boxers have bogeymen and, in football, Emery’s bogeyman is Glasner. Partly, this is down to their polarising approaches to the game. Both managers demand structure and positional discipline from their players, but the systems they employ are fundamentally opposite.

Emery’s narrow structure is based on central attacks and full-backs staying within the width of the 18-yard box without the ball. Glasner’s wide formation is based on road-running wing-backs. It is possession versus transition, control versus duels.

The latest defeat was slightly more nuanced and with more caveats. Forest’s winner through Igor Jesus was directly linked to Villa going down to 10 men in the 82nd minute when Ian Maatsen left the field injured, a knock serious enough that he couldn’t put any weight on his foot. Emery had used all five of his substitutions by the 63rd minute.

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Villa may wish to blame bad luck for two of their players having to leave the field injured (in addition to Maatsen, Pau Torres had to be replaced in the first half). Nevertheless, it was still a gamble to use all five subs with 30 minutes still to play. Emery tends not to point the finger at officials, but did on this occasion, claiming James McAtee should have seen red for his challenge on Maatsen. He did, however, admit his team “did not deserve to win” this game.

Villa losing their left-back is never ideal, but it’s especially difficult against a Glasner side, where the wide areas tend to define these match-ups.

Operating in a 3-4-2-1 system, Glasner’s sides always have an out-ball upon regaining possession, with quick switches to either wing-back. Daniel Munoz, formerly with Glasner at Palace, is a key exponent of this. With Emery drilling his back four into a compact unit and his full-backs tucked in, Munoz is afforded more room to run into than normal.

Out of possession, Glasner has two No 10s and two central midfielders, which means Villa cannot employ their usual tactic of overloading the middle areas and progressing the ball upfield as they wish.

As they did for long stretches at Wembley for the semi-final and in many matches against Glasner’s Palace here at Villa Park, the central defenders spent long periods in possession, passing between one another as Glasner’s No 10s and central midfielders simply blocked passing lanes. It was no surprise that one of the centre-backs, Victor Lindelof, made 19 more passes than any other player on the pitch.

Glasner’s teams are more active when Villa have a goal kick, pushing his wing-backs onto their full-backs and creating a man-to-man game. With Villa unable to pass through midfield and Torres, Emery’s best centre-back passer, replaced, they increasingly went long through Zion Suzuki’s kicks or out wide, which, in the first half without any traditional wingers, was not preferable. 

Emery anticipated these problems. George Hemmings, usually deployed as a left No 10, was asked to stay wide, essentially serving as a left winger. The speedy Maatsen, who would normally overlap Hemmings, tucked in instead to stay behind the ball and be in position to stop Forest breaking.

All best intentions need good execution. Villa could not afford to be sloppy in midfield, considering the four Forest players circling. And yet they were: Liam Delap’s opener came from Boubacar Kamara giving the ball away cheaply.

Villa were ragged and lacked rhythm, with Emery still in the early stages of figuring out his new-look side. Munoz continued to receive in high positions and the wing-back on the opposite side, Neco Williams, had, until Delap’s strike, Forest’s best chance to open the scoring.

Emery made two changes at half-time. Nicolas Jackson, on a yellow card, was hooked and Tammy Abraham took his place. Now without Jackson’s running threat in behind, Emery’s decided to bring on Alysson for Hemmings. It was a rare bright spot on the day to see the Brazilian score his first goal for the club.

“The consequence of how we started the second half was that they scored,” Emery explained, with Forest registering 22 shots and 14 more touches than Villa in the attacking box. “After the goal, they created more chances, and we couldn’t control like in the first half. I don’t know why. I want to see the match again and to understand why we lost our shape.” 

Glasner acknowledged post-match that Maatsen’s injury helped Forest but that, ultimately, his side “deserved to win”.

John McGinn was forced to moonlight at left-back and the Villa captain had no answers to the two-versus-one down his flank, with Munoz and Morgan Gibbs-White creating overloads.

It felt a matter of time before Forest grabbed a winner. Suzuki saved from Munoz at the back post before diving sharply to his left to stop Xaver Schlager’s header, provided by a Munoz cross. The third Munoz-created opportunity was definitive, with his pull-back flicked on by Gibbs-White for Jesus to tap in.

For Villa, there were mitigating circumstances in this latest defeat by Glasner, yet the worry is they are still being caught with the same punches.