Aston Villa head to Old Trafford with a better team, a better manager and better prospects of achieving their ambitions this season than Manchester United.

At this point in the history of both clubs, Villa Park is a better place to be than Old Trafford.

But Aston Villa are not bigger than Manchester United. That statement is not intended to stir the hornet’s nest.

My suggestion that the people in charge at United should consider a move for the Aston Villa manager if they consider him the best in class has not been welcomed at Villa Park, and I get why.

But I cannot stray from my opinion that if I were an executive at one of the elite European clubs and had a managerial vacancy, Unai Emery would be near the top of my wanted list.

You can argue Emery would be stupid to leave Villa for United. You can point out he is on the verge of signing a new deal. You can say that Villa are in a strong position to resist any approaches for the foreseeable future. You will get no disagreement from me on those points.

What is beyond doubt is that by every metric defining a club’s size, United eclipse Villa: honours won, fanbase size, financial power, history, global status. In that head-to-head, it’s not even close. It did not strike me as controversial to suggest that when a club of United’s size wants Aston Villa’s managers or players, traditionally they get them.

I understand that some Villa supporters do not want to hear that. Plenty have made that clear.

My apology to Villa last week was for the language used on The Overlap. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek response to supporters on social media. I wanted to say: “Back off, and stop cherry-picking the points you disagree with and ignoring the rest.”

There was a context to my argument, so I take exception to anyone suggesting my remarks are intended to “keep Villa in their place” or impede their ability to challenge the top clubs by emphasising how much I admire their coach and believe bigger clubs will be looking at him. That is nonsense.

The idea that being a former Liverpool player means being protective of “the elite” or condescendingly looking down at others is a wilful distortion.

No one needs to lecture me about the football pyramid. I watch my son, James, wherever he plays, from Inverness Caledonian Thistle in Scotland to Oldham Athletic in the National League and now Wigan Athletic in League One. My heart and soul is as much in grass-roots football as the top level.

The best football stories are unexpected, often involving those clubs starved of success finally winning a trophy.

Leicester City winning the Premier League was brilliant for English football because it gave everyone else hope, including Aston Villa, who went down that season. Leicester were better than the rest in 2016. It didn’t make them bigger.

That was underlined when the biggest clubs in blue, Manchester City and Chelsea, took most of their best players the following summer.

Check out my comments when Newcastle United won the Carabao Cup against my old club in 2025. It was good for football.

‘I’d be delighted if Villa won the Champions League’

I also loved seeing Villa win the Europa League last season, and West Ham the Conference League under David Moyes with a winning goal from a player they signed from Hull City.

I’d be delighted for Villa if they surprised everyone and won the Champions League. Whisper it around Merseyside, but Everton will be applauded if they win a cup this season, too.

It saddens me that even for clubs of that stature, it has become an underdog tale whenever they take on the serial winners. Football must find a solution to that – a point I reiterated in a conversation on last week’s Overlap with Kieran Maguire, the football finance expert, when discussing how Villa can stay in the top four.

But even if the playing field at the very top were more level, some clubs will always be more attractive. It has always been that way.

At Liverpool, we always knew when one of our best players or the manager performed consistently well, Real Madrid or Barcelona might call – as happened when Michael Owen, Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano left for Spain. You want to fight it, but it will never change.

Equally, if 90 per cent of our Premier League or European opponents had a player we thought better than some of ours, we believed Liverpool could sign him.

Villa reap the benefits of this structure, too, even if there is a tendency from some to focus on what they might lose to those above more than what they take from those below.

When Villa dropped into the Championship, it did not change the fact they were the biggest club in the Midlands. No matter what Tom Brady does at Birmingham City, that’s not changing any time soon. They sought and achieved promotion by raiding Brentford.

Nobody was complaining about a sleeping giant taking Dean Smith, Ezri Konsa or Ollie Watkins and potentially stalling Brentford’s progression.

Nor was it suggested hiring Emery from Villarreal was an odd move given that the Spanish side had recently won the Europa League and reached the latter stages of the Champions League.

Villarreal were a better side in a healthier position than Villa. Guess what, Villa are bigger and flexed their muscles, and Emery would not have wanted his time in England to start and end with Arsenal. He has been able to prove critics wrong.

The principle is the same through the levels – players and managers aspiring to take the next step on the ladder.

My argument has never been that Emery should leave to join a bigger club. Why would I want Emery to join Manchester United? It would make them stronger.

When he commits to a new deal it is great for Villa and the Premier League, underlining how settled he is.

But it is a valid question whether being consistently praised as a coach who thrives at teams who are not expected to challenge for league titles and the Champions League has become a patronising, backhanded compliment.

No world-class manager – and Emery is certainly that – can be happy being perceived as “better outside the elite”. That reputation is based on a difficult period at Arsenal, and a spell at Paris St-Germain where he enjoyed domestic success. He fell short in Europe in Paris, so is bound to be compared unfavourably with Luis Enrique.

Does he have a burning desire to have another go at a club where, if he gets it right, he can compete for the top prizes every year?

United clearly are not at the level of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and PSG right now. But when any manager goes to Old Trafford, over the course of their contract they will be expected to build a team that will go head to head with those European giants. Anything less is failure.

Villa are not judged to that standard.

Emery is Villa’s best coach since their 1981 title-winner Ron Saunders, but he can take his side to Barcelona, get soundly beaten 3-0, and it will be brushed off as an understandable setback against European aristocracy.

United managers cannot suffer that kind of loss without more scrutiny.

‘It would be a surprise if Villa did not finish above United’

That is the benefit and curse of being at one of the world’s biggest clubs, and why United are on the verge of looking for another manager so soon after Michael Carrick took them back into the Champions League. It is likely to be his last game this weekend, so it was pleasing to see the pressure on him lift with the midweek comeback against Roma.

Villa might win at Old Trafford. It would be surprising if they did not finish above United and qualify for Europe again. That would represent a great season because Emery was forced to sell his best players, Morgan Rogers and Konsa, when bigger Premier League clubs bid and the financial rules meant they had to be sold. That would not happen at a European giant.

Every United manager is under no illusions about his long-term target, no matter how unrealistic it might seem right now. It is to win the club’s 21st league title and fourth European Cup.

Regardless of the outcome this weekend, that is the difference between Manchester United and Aston Villa.