John McGinn is confident Aston Villa are going to continue challenging the elite in the Premier League and Europe despite their latest summer shake-up.
Villa have had to sell three of their key players in Morgan Rogers, Youri Tielemans and Lucas Digne – the last of whom to Wednesday’s Super Cup final opponents Paris St Germain.
But skipper McGinn says the “hunger and desire” which took them to Europa League glory last season is still burning at the club. “A lot has changed, yeah, but a lot has changed in the eight years that I’ve been here,” said the Scotland midfielder.
“When we got promoted to the Premier League, there was a lot of change in the summer. When you’re signing the best young English talent, there’s only going to be interest in them. When your players are performing at the highest level, there’s going to be interest.
“So we’ve got a structure in place, we’ve got standards and rules which have made us successful over the past few seasons, and our job is just to integrate the new players and try and make them believe the same way the players in the last few seasons have believed.
“The expectations? Similar to where it’s been in the past few seasons. I think we’ve consistently competed with the best in England, I think we’ve consistently competed with the best in Europe no matter what the competition is.
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“We will have our challenges; there’s a lot of change, but when you look at other clubs around England there’s a lot of changes there as well. A lot of coaches are changing, a lot of players are changing, but what we have still is our main core; the same manager, the same methods, the same desire to achieve more.
“A lot of people thought we’d reached our ceiling a couple of seasons ago and we proved them wrong. We’ve still got the same hunger and desire to go and achieve more, and as long as we’ve got the hunger and desire to do that you can expect as much as possible.”
Boss Unai Emery revealed Villa will be without Ollie Watkins, Ezri Konsa and Emi Martinez in Salzburg, the trio having been given extended breaks after going deep at the World Cup.
The Spaniard has managed in three Super Cup finals previously and lost the lot, including a penalty shoot-out defeat by Chelsea with Villarreal in 2021.
“Of course tomorrow we are not going to be in our best moment,” he said.
“Because I played three times the Super Cup, and more or less all the matches we played were in August, it is more or less similar.
“But tomorrow we are going to compete. We are preparing this game with the players we started with four weeks ago, even some young players, and tomorrow, I expect to compete.”
