Emery: Watkins Apologised For Refusing To Play Before Emotional Villa Exit

Unai Emery hugged Ollie Watkins goodbye this week with what he described as “small tears.” Only days earlier, the striker had refused to play for Aston Villa. Both things are true, and the Villa manager spent Friday explaining how the club got from one to the other.

Watkins made himself unavailable for Villa’s Premier League opener against Brighton, a match the club lost heavily. Emery confirmed the striker apologised for the decision afterwards, and that both the manager and the squad accepted it, even as Watkins now prepares to leave the club he has represented for five years.

“He was wrong, but we accepted it”

Emery did not try to hide what had happened. “He told us after the Brighton match he was sorry and that he had made a mistake. He was wrong, but we accepted it. The players as well,” the Villa boss said.

Even given the circumstances of his final week, Emery’s assessment of Watkins as a person and a professional across his time at the club was almost entirely positive. “His commitment and his behaviour was fantastic. He’s a fantastic guy, a fantastic guy even more than a player,” Emery said. “I told him ‘bye’ with a huge hug and with small tears.”

Watkins is expected in Saudi Arabia on Friday to complete a £51m move to Al-Hilal, bringing an end to a spell in claret and blue that turned him into a club record holder and a fixture of the England squad.

Emery has managed Watkins for almost three full years, having taken charge at Villa Park in November 2022. Across that period the pair built one of the more productive manager-striker relationships in the Premier League, with Emery’s tactical setup regularly built around getting the ball to Watkins in the areas where he did the most damage. That history is part of why the manager chose to speak about the striker’s exit in personal terms rather than treating it as a routine squad departure.

A club record scorer moves on

Watkins joined Villa from Brentford for £28m in 2020 and leaves as the club’s record Premier League scorer, with 91 goals in the competition and 108 in all competitions. Few strikers outside the traditional elite have delivered that kind of consistency for a single club across five seasons, and his finishing helped drive Villa’s rise from a team fighting relegation to one competing in Europe.

That rise included the Europa League triumph in May, the high point of Watkins’ time at the club and a trophy his goals helped deliver. He also became a fixture for England across his years at Villa Park, turning himself from a player overlooked by bigger clubs when he left Brentford into a forward trusted at international level. None of that history changed the outcome of the Brighton match, but it explains why Emery chose to speak about his departure with gratitude rather than grievance.

“But now it’s a new chapter here with Nicolas Jackson,” Emery said, turning to the player Villa hope can fill the gap. The club have agreed a deal for the Chelsea forward worth £65m and are working to have him registered in time for Monday’s visit of Arsenal, a tight turnaround that would hand Jackson an immediate route into the side.

Jackson arrives at Villa Park with a very different profile to the man he replaces. Where Watkins built his reputation on movement and finishing inside the box across five settled seasons, Jackson has spent his time at Chelsea competing for a starting role rather than owning one outright. Villa’s hope is that a fresh environment and a manager willing to build his attack around him will produce the same kind of consistency Watkins delivered. Those signs will only come once he has had a proper chance to train with his new team-mates.

Defending a summer of departures

Watkins is the latest experienced player to leave Villa Park this summer, following Morgan Rogers, Youri Tielemans, Ezri Konsa and Lucas Digne out of a squad that won the Europa League in May. Emery used his press conference to defend the scale of the turnover, asking supporters to trust a strategy that has reshaped large parts of the squad within a few short weeks.

“We took decisions because it’s good for the club,” Emery said. “Of course, we don’t want to be a club that sells players, but the responsibility is there. It’s crazy [money for someone] 30 years old and £50m for Ezri Konsa [who is 28].”

He went further, presenting the exodus as a deliberate piece of business rather than a squad falling apart under financial pressure. “How we developed in the last year with some players and how we can sell some players now is completely the right decision,” he said. “We have to rebuild the team as fast as possible. Fans have to accept our way and why we are taking some decisions.”

Emery’s reference to Konsa’s £50m sale to Arsenal was pointed. A defender who had been a regular starter through Villa’s rise up the table commanded a fee usually reserved for far more established Premier League centre-backs, and Emery’s comparison suggested the club had used the same logic to assess Watkins’ value before deciding a £51m return from Saudi Arabia was worth accepting for a player entering the second half of his career. Selling at peak value, rather than waiting for form or fitness to dip, has clearly become the guiding principle behind Villa’s business this window.

Goretzka arrives as part of the rebuild

The incoming side of Villa’s ledger has moved just as fast as the outgoing one. Leon Goretzka completed his move on a free transfer from Bayern Munich on Thursday, arriving with seven Bundesliga titles and a Champions League winner’s medal from his time in Germany.

“He is a winner. He is a very competitive player, a good player to add into our squad,” Emery said of the midfielder. “He is versatile and arrives fit and training well. Hopefully on Monday he can be on the field.”

That Goretzka could be involved against Arsenal within days of signing says something about how quickly Emery wants his rebuilt squad to function. Villa go into the match having lost Watkins, Konsa, Tielemans, Rogers and Digne in the months after their Europa League triumph, while adding Goretzka, Jackson and others in a squad overhaul that has run in parallel with the emotional business of saying goodbye to one of the club’s most reliable performers of the last decade.

Villa’s approach this summer has been to sell established, higher-earning players and reinvest in a mix of proven Premier League quality and cut-price opportunities like Goretzka’s free transfer. It is a model that carries obvious risk if the incoming players fail to adapt quickly, but Emery’s willingness to speak publicly and repeatedly about the reasoning behind it suggests a club trying to manage supporter expectations as much as its finances.

What comes next

For Watkins, the move to Al-Hilal closes his Premier League career for now, with his final involvement at the club overshadowed by the events of the Brighton match rather than by a farewell on his own terms. Emery made clear that, in his view, the apology and the manner of Watkins’ conduct in the years before it counted for more than a single mistake in his last week at the club. It leaves supporters with a slightly awkward memory of how their record scorer’s spell ended, set against five years of goals that will keep his name near the top of the club’s history books regardless.

The fee itself, £51m for a 30-year-old forward, reflects the level of interest Saudi clubs have shown in established Premier League talent this window, and Villa’s willingness to sell at that price fits the pattern Emery described of moving players on while their value remains high. It is a very different equation to the one that brought Watkins to the club in 2020, when Villa paid Brentford £28m for a forward with no top-flight experience and considerable doubts attached.

For Villa, the immediate focus shifts to Monday night and whether Jackson can be involved from the start against Arsenal having barely had time to train with his new team-mates. Emery’s message to supporters, repeated throughout Friday’s press conference, was that the club had a plan for exactly this moment. The departure that triggered it played out more awkwardly than anyone at Villa Park would have wanted, but the plan stood regardless. Whether that plan pays off will not be clear for weeks, but the pace of the turnover, five senior players out and a comparable number in inside a single transfer window, leaves little room for a slow start against Arsenal or anyone else on the fixture list.

What Emery cannot replace with a single signing is the certainty Watkins provided in front of goal across five consistent seasons. Jackson, Goretzka and the rest of Villa’s new arrivals will each get time to prove themselves, but the goalscoring record Watkins leaves behind sets an obvious benchmark for whoever eventually claims his place as the club’s leading striker.