The smile on Youri Tielemans’ face widens as he discusses the summer Unai Emery visited him in Quorn, the Leicestershire village he has called home since arriving in England six years ago. “The initial conversation was about my ideas as a player, where I wanted to play and how I saw myself and I think he quite liked me because he came back a second time,” Tielemans says, laughing. “It was really about understanding each other. And I think we clicked the first time we met.”
Fast-forward two years and Tielemans, who joined Aston Villa as a free agent after leaving Leicester, has established himself as an indispensable cog in Emery’s machine. Tielemans has been considered a classy midfielder since making his Champions League debut for Anderlecht aged 16 and has proved a dependable force for Villa, an intelligent operator whether sniffing danger or shifting possession. The 28-year-old thinks carefully on and off the pitch, valuing sleep and nutrition; he is teetotal and those close to him highlight the only fizzy drink he may consume is sparkling water. In January, before Tielemans returned to his former club Monaco with Villa in the Champions League, Emery said Tielemans’s “best quality is in his mind, his mentality”.
Tielemans is an affable but private character, laser-focused on family and football. He clocked up 60 matches for club and country last season, including 52 starts for Villa. The last match was in Brussels in June, a wild 4-3 World Cup qualifying victory over Wales. Tielemans scored with a sweet first-time finish and laid on Kevin De Bruyne with a magnificent cross for Belgium’s winner.
“I always feel like once I’m in that rhythm, I feel the best I can be, really. When I’m in that rhythm, you just play, recover, play, recover, and you just get used to it and hopefully, I can do that again. We’re obviously well tracked by medical and technical staff – there are a lot of things going on backstage, I would say, where you have to just give your body the best chance possible to perform.”
A marathon campaign called for some downtime with his wife, Mendy, and their three daughters, aged eight, five and one. So, what did his summer look like? “Just following the kids around, to be honest … that’s a lot of work sometimes,” he says, smiling. “But I enjoy it. I just want to be there for them, to watch them grow up. It’s the main thing for me as a father. They all have their own characters – they’re so different from each other – but when we play together, it’s just so enjoyable.”
Despite a near-flawless run at the end of last season – Villa won 10 of their last 11 league matches before a final-day trip to Manchester United – hopes of qualifying for the Champions League in successive seasons unravelled with defeat at Old Trafford. The worst bit for Tielemans was he was watching at home, powerless to influence things owing to a calf niggle. “Looking back at last season, there were some games where we lost a few points and you think: ‘How on earth did that happen?’ And that’s where this season you want to make sure that you don’t lose those stupid points. There were a few games where we analysed them back and said to ourselves: ‘This can’t happen.’”
Tielemans does not pinpoint particular matches, but the failure to beat Ipswich last season and squandering victory against Bournemouth at Villa Park with seconds to play left a sour taste. “There were a few games where the manager was a bit frustrated with the fact that he didn’t have all the players available due to injuries and other problems. He really wants that availability this season to be able to make changes whenever a player is tired, because that’s what cost us as well.”
It is hard to imagine now but Tielemans had a slow start to life at Villa; the 2023-24 season was four months old by the time his first league start arrived. Emery described Tielemans’ first season as an adaptation period. What did Tielemans have to change? “I think it was just that my levels were not good enough at the time,” he says. Was that something he acknowledged then? “No, no,” he says, exploding into laughter. “Once you’re in it, you don’t realise what’s going on. But, looking back, that’s the beauty of life, really; you understand, you try and learn from what’s happened.
“Because I don’t think I made any mistakes in that time, I was just maybe not good enough to play in that team. The team was performing well, winning games,” Tielemans adds, referencing a 15-game winning streak at Villa Park that stretched almost the entire calendar year, “so why would the manager have changed that team? And then you start understanding: ‘OK, I need to perform better, I understand the system better now and now it’s up to me to do better.’ I took some time to put the [manager’s] system in my body because it’s quite demanding.”
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Villa have taken enormous strides under Emery. There is a natural thirst to evolve but Tielemans knows from his own experiences that it is not that straightforward. Tielemans tasted relegation with Leicester in 2023, two years after his sumptuous strike at Wembley clinched the FA Cup and after three successive top-eight finishes. “You always have to push yourself, you have to adapt and tweak tactically, physically as well you have to get better because it gets harder every season and you don’t want to get found out in your tactics and that’s why you need those tweaks.”
Did he feel he had a point to prove after leaving Leicester, especially given a highly successful spell ended with relegation? “Not particularly because of that, because I always have something to prove. I just want to be better every day, so that’s just in my mentality. It’s not that I want to prove to anyone anything, I always want to push myself, to prove to myself that … yeah, that I’m good.”
Tielemans, a modest character with more than 600 career appearances, is underselling himself. Fans will vouch he has been great, not good. The Villa captain, John McGinn, described Tielemans as their best player “by a mile” last season and Tielemans took home the players’ player and supporters’ player of the season awards. Now he is targeting another successful season, starting against Newcastle at Villa Park on Saturday lunchtime. “They’re a very good side and to have that kind of game as your first game of the season is always nice to get back into it,” Tielemans says.
Villa’s primary focus is the Premier League but from day one Emery stressed he wanted to win silverware and decorate a trophy in claret and blue. At the end of next month Villa, whose last triumph was the League Cup in 1996, will start their quest in the Europa League, a competition Emery has won on a record four occasions. “He wants to win, and that’s why he wants his players to be winners as well,” says Tielemans. “We are ambitious, we want to do better than last season. We got to the semi-finals against [Crystal] Palace in the FA Cup, and it was not good enough on that day. Looking back, it’s something that we really want as a team, but it’s a long journey.”
