Having managed to steer Aston Villa to a very impressive 1-0 win over Manchester City on Wednesday night, Unai Emery is being lauded left, right and centre.
The win over Pep Guardiola allowed the Villans to hoist themselves up to third in the Premier League table, which everyone around the Birmingham based club will be hoping continues over the coming weeks and months.
Meanwhile, over at Paris Saint-Germain, there are some, like France Bleu journalist Romain Beddouk, looking from afar and wondering what could have been had the club not fired Emery, paving the way for him to eventually end up at Aston Villa.
Kicking off by reminding everyone that the Spaniard was the man in charge of the Ligue 1 side during the famous remontada, who lost the league to a Kylian Mbappé led AS Monaco, he also makes a point of stating how good of a tactician the 52-year-old is.
His initial situation at Paris Saint-Germain wasn’t the most favourable, having lost Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and having to make do with incoming transfers such as Jesé or Hatem Ben Arfa.
He tried his best, mind, and was gifted the likes of Neymar and Kylian Mbappé later on, which forced him to adapt around those players rather than have them abide by his principles.
In short, there is a feeling that everyone was ‘too harsh with Unai Emery’ in Paris, perhaps because his ‘French accent allowed for mockery’, or that he was replacing Laurent Blanc, who many thought was wrongly sacked.
While he was not ‘perfect’, and struggled to manage the egos at Paris Saint-Germain, what followed shows just how good he actually is as a manager, including this incredibly impressive third place in the Premier League with Aston Villa.
That’s why, Baddouck says, you can ‘only respect the manager he is and already was’ when he was in France.
