Douglas Luiz is delighted to be back at Aston Villa. Ask him what he missed about the place and his answer is swift. “Everything! I missed the players, the coach. Villa Park, for me, is very special too. Here, I had my best my moments. I missed everything.”The Brazilian tells Sky Sports: “I really appreciate coming back to Aston Villa, where I showed my best football with this team, with this coach, because for one year and a half I did not play so well since I left Aston Villa.” It is his first answer. Straight out with it.
When the midfielder left Villa in the summer of 2024 having helped the club to qualify for the Champions League, he was one of their best players. He departed for Juventus in a £42m deal having just turned 26 and seemed well set to play his best football in Italy.
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But he returns to Villa just 18 months later off the back of a loan spell at Nottingham Forest that was hampered not only by injury but a reduced status. He started only five Premier League games for Forest. He was an unused substitute more often than that.What happened since he left Villa? “I don’t know, maybe it was the adaptation,” he says. “It is another team, another coach, another idea. It did not go so well, that is true. But this helped me a lot because even in the bad moments you can get something.”
Circumstances have seen him trade a relegation battle for a return to the club sitting third in the Premier League table. Injuries to Boubacar Kamara, Youri Tielemans and John McGinn left a gap in the midfield. Unai Emery decided he was the best option to fill it.
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Douglas Luiz has been reunited with his former boss Unai Emery at Aston Villa
Luiz reveals: “In the first call, he said, ‘Douglas, we need you a lot in this moment.’ I just told him, ‘Gaffer, you know me. I am ready to play. I am ready to come back.’ He believes in me a lot and I believe in him. The combination that we have is so special.”
Speaking to Emery about this, he explains the logic behind Luiz’s return and the reasons why he was the right choice. “Douglas Luiz, he knows us. He knows everything we were working on and building here, our mentality, our demands,”…
2026-02-27 08:30:00
