Aston Villa’s Champions League trip to Barcelona feels like a deeply Unai Emery occasion

“One more match. Just one more match.” Sure, Unai. Sure. Just like all the other matches that generated a local tremor measured at one on the Richter scale when that seventh and final goal went in at the Camp Nou in March 2017.

It was inevitable Unai Emery would be asked about the Remontada game on the eve of Aston Villa’s engagement with Barcelona, his first trip back to Camp Nou in the Champions League since one of the most visceral and traumatic experiences of his managerial career.

Emery was Paris Saint-Germain manager the night the Neymar-Messi-Suarez triple-godhead reversed a 4-0 first-leg quarter-final deficit.

For all the talk of lasting trauma, Emery stayed in Paris for another season, won a domestic treble, and three clubs later has two European trophies to his name. Plus, of course, a trip back here now, with only the lurking shadow of being asked to do the Manchester United job hanging over an otherwise cloudless period in his elite coaching career.

“What happened in that match, we know. I started coaching in 2004, 22 years in a row. I’ve played in Europe 16 years in a row, and I’ve learned in all the competitions and matches. In that match I learned so, so much,” said Emery.

European football has done a pretty good job over the last two seasons of turning its own autumn fixture blizzard into a hopeless and baggy blur. What serious sport actually has a 36-team mega-table? And a deeply predictable 36-team mega-table at that, one where you pretty much know who’s going to be up there at the end of it. If the intention was to create a series of exhibition-style TV-product events, thereby heading off the Super League’s desire to do exactly the same, then mission semi-accomplished.

There are still exceptions in the period of drift, one-off events that speak to the colour and cultural weight of this competition. Tuesday night is one of them. For Villa’s fans, it’s a genuine staging point in the progress of this ever-evolving team, with a chance (dependent on results elsewhere) to actually top the Champions League mega-table at this early stage.

This feels like a deeply Emery occasion. Not so much a homecoming – the Basque coastal town where he grew up is 350 miles northwest of Barcelona. As a player, Emery never made it on to the pitch against Barça, but as a manager, this has been an endlessly gruelling two-hander – 30 games across Almería, Valencia, Spartak Moscow, Sevilla, PSG, and Villarreal. It’s been an ongoing tale of sorrow, with 21 defeats and just three wins.

Not that you’d know it. Emery has always come here with teams that are punching up. He spoke on the eve of his latest return with a genuine conviction about learning from each of those occasions, focused as ever on the possibilities in front of him.

“These games gave me experience to learn, to get better, to intensify for the next matches I face. With the players, we talked about our experiences together. We had our experience in Europe, two years ago, last year. This year, we have won three matches and done fantastic work. Tomorrow [Tuesday], we are facing one of the favourites to win the competition, so we are going to face a huge challenge,” he said.

Camp Nou is still in a state of furious renovation, surrounded by hoardings, railings and rubble-strewn strips of land, but inside, the fixings are taking shape. The current team is also a high-functioning work in progress. La Masia continues to produce omni-talented high-technique teenagers. There is a slight, and understandable, sense of a soft centre at times, but also one of fluent and dreamy possession football.

Villa will be aggressive, hard-pressing, and geared to assert their physical advantages. Captain John McGinn was sat next to his manager in the pop-up press conference room and revealed he had only been to Camp Nou once before, as an eight-year-old on holiday. It happened to be the same day Ricardo Quaresma signed for Barcelona and had his unveiling at the stadium.

McGinn talked about his own journey alongside the Villa fans from the Championship to this elite stage. He praised Barcelona’s humility and work ethic, but said Villa had the players to hurt them.

It is a fitting palate cleanser, a chance to move on from the dominant piece of Aston Villa news so far this week, which isn’t actually news or even really anything to do with Villa.

There was a great deal of heat over the weekend at Jamie Carragher’s assertion there is “a food chain” in English football, that Aston Villa will naturally remain below Manchester United in this hierarchy, and, as such, Emery would always feel the need to climb to that higher level.

The only part of this statement that seems unarguably true is that Jamie Carragher doesn’t know how food chains work. In reality, a food chain is mutable. This is not a fixed order. Dynamic population. Habitat shifts. Mutable omnivore status. The food chain is constantly rotating, overlapping, redefining itself.

A more accurate analogy would be that the Premier League is unlike a food chain at all, but instead a place where money has created genuine stratification. On the other hand, is what Carragher thought he was saying even true?

Villa are pushing hard at the envelope. They’re in Barcelona. Manchester United is an idea, beloved of legacy consumers, its footprint is still vast, but it’s a footprint in shifting sands.

For Barcelona, Dani Olmo, Andreas Christensen, Eric García and Xavi Espart are expected to miss the game, opening up some potential for defensive frailty. Nicholas Jackson is expected to be fit to start for Villa after playing 90 minutes at the weekend.