Man Utd vs Aston Villa: Complete head-to-head record

Manchester United and Aston Villa have both enjoyed their peak at the summit of English top-flight football but at dramatically different times.

It was in a Villa fan’s coffee shop that the club’s board member William McGregor came up with the idea to establish an organised football league in 1888. Villa duly dominated the new division, racking up six titles by 1910.

A century later, Manchester United were at the forefront of the biggest shakeup in English football since McGregor’s decisive cup of Joe. United were the inaugural Premier League champions – incidentally pipping Villa to first place – and racked up 13 of the first 21 titles on offer.

Here’s a complete history of the rivalry that has been interwoven between each club’s period of dominance.

Manchester United should have been buoyed by the absence of Aston Villa’s relentless goal-getter Tom ‘Pongo’ Waring when they travelled to Birmingham two days after Christmas 1930. Yet, even without their most prolific player, Villa racked up an obscene 7-0 scoreline.

United were in freefall. A 4-3 reverse at Old Trafford against Villa proved to be a prescient start to the season. United lost their first 12 league matches – the worst start of any team in Europe’s top five leagues until Serie A‘s Benevento broke the unwanted record in 2017 – and by the new year, relegation was a matter of when rather than if.

Peter McParland is understandably defensive when the topic of conversation invariably turns to the 1957 FA Cup final. One of Aston Villa’s greatest-ever wingers bagged a match-winning brace at Wembley that day but left United’s goalkeeper Ray Wood with concussion after a collision in the sixth minute.

McParland’s powerful header and close-range blast flew past United’s centre-half Jackie Blanchflower, who had to take the place of Wood in the days before substitutes.

“Down the years when people have bought up the incident and reminded me I was the player who crashed into the United goalkeeper and then scored two goals, I say that: ‘No. I’m the player who won an FA Cup winner’s medal,'” McParland insisted decades after a game he has never been allowed to forget.

Federico Macheda was living the dream – literally. “I have dreamed of a day like this,” the 17-year-old striker panted after marking his