Aston Villa know exactly where to hurt Club Brugge in Champions League after stats expose glaring weakness

It’s official, Aston Villa will take on Club Brugge in the UEFA Champions League last 16. The Villans have been handed arguably the most favourable draw out of any team left in the competition, especially as the second leg will be played on home soil.

Unai Emery’s side lost to Brugge back in the league phase but that was a freak result as Tyrone Mings was penalised for a bizarre handball, picking up from Emi Martinez thinking he was set to take a goal kick instead. Brugge scored from the penalty spot and won that game 1-0, Villa unable to strike back.

If anything, that disappointing result from earlier this campaign will add another layer of determination for Villa to win next time around. Taking on the Belgian Pro League side away in Brugge in the first leg, the Villans will be eager to gain an early aggregate advantage before attempting to see out the tie at Villa Park the week after.

Club Brugge’s main weakness exposed

As Brugge are one of the smaller clubs left in the competition, it won’t come as much of a surprise that they’re one of the worst in an attacking sense – at least in terms of the volume of chances created. Nicky Hayen’s side scored merely seven goals in the eight league phase matches and then turned very clinical to see off Atalanta 5-2 on aggregate in the play-off round.

Brugge went toe-to-toe with Atalanta in the first leg as they won 2-1, managing 11 shots to the Italian visitors’ 12. The second leg was very different, though, with Brugge incredibly running out 3-1 victors despite registering only seven shots to a Atalanta’s 30. Surely, Brugge won’t be able to maintain such a clinical scoring rate for too much longer.

Looking at the expected goals (xG) metric, 10.94 is the second-worst of the 16 teams left in the competition, with only LOSC Lille managing fewer with 10.48. And as Villa had the fifth-best xG conceded (9.86) in the league phase, you’d expect Brugge to continue struggling with creating chances.

Unai Emery trumps Nicky Hayen, by a long stretch

The gulf in top managerial experience between Emery and Hayen is astounding. Experience isn’t necessarily always the best way to rank the overall quality of a head coach but it certainly helps, especially under the immense pressure of reaching the latter stages of the Champions League.

This is remarkably Emery’s seventeenth consecutive season of European football and the Spaniard has won an incredible four Europa League titles – three with Sevilla and one with Villarreal. In contrast, Brugge’s head coach Hayen had never managed in Europe before March 2024.

Emery knows exactly what it takes to progress even further than this and the Spaniard will already have one eye on the quarter-final. If Villa beat Brugge, they will take on either Liverpool or Paris Saint-Germain in the last eight, possibly setting up a semi-final against either Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, Arsenal or PSV Eindhoven after that.