It Was Never Really About Football
The people who stay calm eventually change everything
It’s May 20th 2026. I’m sitting in a pub in Bristol with some old developer friends from my agency days. On the big screen behind the bar the score reads 3-0.
I’ve never been so calmly confident about anything in my life: Aston Villa are going to win this.
Aston Villa are going to be European champions.
I’ve waited thirty years for it. The last time I saw Villa lift a trophy was 1996. I was just a kid.
Yes, I’m talking about football. But stick with me, because I’m also not really talking about football.
Supporting this club has shaped me in ways I didn’t fully understand until much later.
A kid in claret and blue
I’m not from Birmingham. There aren’t many things I have in common with Prince William or Tom Hanks but, like them, I was adopted by Villa.
Honestly, I fell in love with the club before I even knew where Birmingham was.
It was 1994. Aston Villa vs Manchester United in the League Cup final. Villa soaked up pressure and exploded forward on the counter-attack. By the time they went two goals up I knew I’d found my team.
They lifted the trophy that day. Then they did it again two years later.
What I didn’t realise was that I’d have to wait until my 40s to see it happen again.
Watching them decline taught me a lot. Watching what happened next taught me even more.
It sounds ridiculous to say a football club shaped my career. But I genuinely think Aston Villa did.
The fall
By 2015 things were looking bleak.
The club had been mediocre for years, but this was when the neglect and poor decisions finally caught up with them. They finished rock bottom.
Not unlucky. Not hard done by. Just bad. They deserved relegation.
The club had spent years drifting. Acting like history alone would save them. Sleepwalking through seasons while everything around them changed.
It was embarrassing to watch.
But looking back, I’m glad it happened.
Sometimes things have to completely fail before anyone is willing to admit they’re broken.
Villa needed the shock. They needed to hit the floor. Failure was the thing that finally forced the club to wake the hell up.
Up the Villa
Fast forward to late 2022.
Things had improved. Villa were back in the Premier League and the club finally seemed to have owners with an actual vision for the future. But they were still hovering dangerously close to another relegation battle. A trophy still felt absurdly out of reach.
Then the owners made a decision that changed everything.
They turned to a manager who understood failure.
Unai Emery had already lived through public embarrassment at the highest level. People mocked him. Wrote him off. Turned him into a punchline. But instead of letting failure destroy him, he studied it. Learned from it.
He wasn’t a traditionally charismatic leader. He didn’t deliver cinematic speeches. In fact, his Spanish accent is so thick that when he first arrived you had to concentrate to understand half of what he was saying.
But underneath that was something far more important.
Calmness. Discipline. Patience. Preparation. Standards.
Competence.
And over time I realised something: genuinely capable people rarely need to announce themselves.
Capability is underrated
Supporting Villa taught me something I wish I’d understood earlier in my career.
The world is obsessed with charisma. With confidence. With hype. Especially in tech.
But the people who actually change things are usually the quietly capable ones.
The ones who keep showing up.
The ones who learn from failure instead of hiding from it.
The ones who build systems instead of chasing moments.
The ones who stay calm when everything around them is chaotic.
Watching Aston Villa rise from one of the lowest points in the club’s modern history to lifting a European trophy didn’t just change how I think about football.
It changed how I think about leadership, careers, failure and getting older.
Strange thing to learn from a football club really.
But then again, it was never really about football.