Youth vs Aston Villa Predictions

Youth Teams vs Aston Villa Stats: Quick Hits

• Aston Villa have been tipped as favorites for this match by the Opta supercomputer, winning 48.61 TP3T in 10,000 pre-match simulations.
• The Villans will become the 11th English club to play in the Champions League.
• Aston Villa will be the sixth team Unai Emery has coached in the Champions League; only Carlo Ancelotti has coached more in the tournament.

Match Preview

Aston Villa will be in action on Tuesday in the Champions League when they take on Swiss Juniors on Matchday 1 of the 2024-25 season, with a new fixture system introduced to the competition.

Unlike the old system of eight groups of four teams, the Champions League has been expanded to 36 teams this season, all in one league table. Each club will play eight different teams, four at home and four away, with the top eight at the end of the group stage progressing to the round of 16, and the teams ranked 9th to 24th going through to the play-offs.

Villa are heading into the Champions League after finishing fourth in the 2023-24 Premier League season and will be confident of making a positive start in Bern.

The Villans will also become the first new English team to play in the tournament since Leicester City in the 2016-17 season, and they will become the 11th different English club to play in the Champions League since it began in 1992.

Although they have never played in the Champions League before, Villa are former winners of the Europa League (1981-82 season). Their last appearance in the top flight of European soccer was last season, reaching the quarterfinals before being eliminated by Juventus.

They may not be regulars at this level, although their manager is certainly no newcomer. Villa will be Unai Emery's sixth different team to coach in the Champions League, having previously played for Valencia, Sparta Moscow, Sevilla, Paris Saint-Germain and Villarreal.

In fact, the only coach who has coached more different clubs in the competition is the great Carlo Ancelotti (8 times).

Emery's last Champions League campaign was in May 2022, when he was still in charge of Villarreal; he led them all the way to the semi-finals of the 2021-22 season before losing 5-2 on aggregate to Liverpool. Nonetheless, it was the deepest he had ever led a team in a tournament.

However, Villa have not been completely absent from European football recently. They reached the semi-finals of the Europa League last season before losing to eventual winners Olympiacos in a 6-2 aggregate blowout.

Ollie Watkins scored five goals along the way, equalling the record for the most by a Villa player in a major European season (tied with Gary Shaw in the 1982-83 European Cup and John Deighan in the 1977-78 League Cup).

Villa's hosts on Tuesday don't have a particularly impressive record in the Champions League. While they did win their last home game against Crvena Zvezda last season, they haven't won back-to-back UCL matches at the Wankdorf Stadium for several years; nonetheless, those victories - in 2018 and 2021 - have - were against Juventus and Manchester United.

Emery will continue to be without long-term absentees Tyrone Mings and Boubacar Kamara, while Leon Bailey and Matty Cash won't return for a while.

Nonetheless, there were no new injuries to report after Saturday's come-from-behind win over Everton; Villa trailed 0-2 at half-time to the Toffees, but thanks to Watkins' first two goals of the season, they fought back and won 3-2 thanks to Jon Doolan's superb long-range shot in the dying moments.

This ensured Villa ended the weekend in fifth place in the Premier League table with nine points behind Manchester City, Arsenal and Newcastle.

Meanwhile, Young Boys have endured a miserable start to their domestic season. After six games, they are still winless, although they did beat third division side Sporting Vevey in the Swiss Cup at the weekend.

Youth vs Aston Villa Head-to-Head

This will be the first official meeting between the Young Boys and Aston Villa.

The Swiss team had won only 7 of their previous 24 Champions League meetings with English clubs (D6 L11), and 6 of those 7 victories were achieved by Basel (1 was a youth team).

The youth team's one win against English opposition in the Champions League (D1 L4) in September 2021 (from the previous six matches) was a 2-1 win at home to Manchester United. They lost home and away to Manchester City in last season's competition.

Opta Strength Ranking

Opta Power Rankings is a global team ranking system that assigns ability scores to over 13,000 domestic soccer teams on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is the worst ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world.

Before kickoff, here are the Opta power rankings for both sides.

Youth vs Aston Villa Predictions

Opta supercomputerMaking Aston Villa favorites to make their Champions League debut, Emery's side won 48.61 TP3T in 10,000 pre-match simulations.

However, don't completely rule out Young Boys' shocking victory. The hosts took all three points in the 27.4% simulation, while the tie occurred in the 24% simulation.

Either way, neither team is expected to go deep in the tournament.

The predictive model suggests Villa are only 9.1% to reach the quarter-finals, with 22 clubs considered more likely to go further.Young Boys reached the last 16 with just 4.3% in the season simulation; only Slovan Bratislava (1.2%) and Shakhtar Donetsk Miners (3.9%) committed suicide less frequently.

Youth team vs Aston Villa UCL team

youngsterDavid Von Balmers, Marvin Keller, Dario Mazino, Jaun Hadjam, Bansi Zukeru, Patrick Pfeiffer, Muhammad Ali Kamara, Saidi Janko, Abdou Konté, Loris Benito, Zachary Atkame, Llewyn Bloom, Filip Ughellenic, Lukas Lakomi, Castréo Imery, Miguel Chaiwa, Cheikh Niasse, Sandro Lauper, Darian Marais, Cedric Iten, Ebrima Coli, Meshack Elia, Alan Virginius, Silvier Gamvula.

Aston Villa: Emiliano Martinez, Robin Olsen, Joe Gotch, Matty Cash, Kosta Nedeljkovic, Ezri Konsa, Paulo Torres, Diego Carlos, Tyrone Mings, Ian Mathieson, Lucas Digne, Boubacar Kamara, Ross Barkley, John McGinn, Yuri Thielemans, Emiliano Buendia, Jaden Filokin , Amadou Onaona, Jacob Ramsay, Morgan Rogers, Leon Bailey, Jon Doolan, Ollie Watkins.