Unai Emery, Aston Villa and the Ladder Nobody Climbs Anymore

Jamie Carragher got some stick for calling it a food chain. He was right.

English and European football runs on a pecking order, and it is more rigid now than at any point in living memory. A small group of clubs sit at the top on a financial plane nobody else can reach. Everyone below them spends the season feeding on whoever is smaller, surviving, occasionally thriving, and now and again getting close enough to the top table to make the people sitting at it uncomfortable. Getting that close carries a cost.

Aston Villa are the illustration right now. Unai Emery has done enough at Villa Park that Manchester United cannot stop looking at him. That is the mechanism in plain sight. Build something good outside the elite and the elite turn up to take pieces of it, starting with the manager.

Plenty of people will tell you it was always like this, that the big eat the small on a football pitch the same way they do everywhere else. The honest answer is that it was never quite like this.

Run the numbers on the last ten seasons of the big five leagues. Fifty titles were available across England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Sixteen clubs won them: four in England, four in Italy, three in Spain, three in France, two in Germany. Forty-six of those fifty went to a club sitting inside the top sixteen of Deloitte's revenue table. The exceptions you can count on one hand. Napoli, champions of Italy twice in four years. Monaco and Lille, who each interrupted Paris Saint-Germain long enough to remind everyone Ligue 1 still had other teams in it.

None of that means dominance is new. Real Madrid and Barcelona have been eating La Liga since the mid-1980s. Milan, Inter and Juventus did the same in Italy. Liverpool owned English football through the seventies and eighties before Manchester United took the baton for twenty years.

The difference is what used to be possible around the edges. Valencia won Spain twice in the early 2000s, and Deportivo La Coruna once. Lazio and Roma took Serie A off the big three. Werder Bremen, Stuttgart and Wolfsburg all lifted the Bundesliga. Bordeaux, Lille, Marseille and Montpellier were all champions of France, before Bayern Munich and PSG turned their leagues into private property.

Europe tells the same story, only louder. In the first thirteen seasons of the Champions League, from 1992-93 to 2004-05, ten different clubs lifted the trophy and they came from seven different countries: one Spanish, two Italian, two English, two German, one French, one Dutch, one Portuguese. Twenty-three clubs reached a semi-final in that window, from nine different leagues. Dynamo Kyiv got there. So did Panathinaikos.

Across the twenty-one seasons since 2005-06, the semi-final list has shrunk to twenty-two clubs from six leagues. Exactly one of them came from outside the five richest competitions. That was Ajax in 2019, and the squad that got them there was dismantled within months by the clubs above them. Monaco and Borussia Dortmund had already learned the same lesson.

So when Villa supporters watch the Emery speculation and feel uneasy, they are reading the situation correctly. The food chain is not a complaint. It is a description.