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John McGinn has spent the best part of half an hour reflecting on his journey to this point, his next appearance for Aston Villa his 300th for the club, when he volunteers something of a confession. Asked whether he has lasered in on nutrition to maximise performance, perhaps inspired by Erling Haaland revealing his penchant for raw milk and honey, the Villa captain smiles a little sheepishly. “Yeah, I have, which makes me feel quite uncomfortable because I’m from a very humble part of the world,” he says, referring to his roots in Clydebank, a few miles north-west of Glasgow.
“They will all laugh at me and wind me up for it but I do have a chef at home. I think there is a stigma towards it: ‘Who do you think you are?’ Which I get, because it used to be me thinking that. I was more nervous about telling my siblings and my mum and dad about the idea of having a chef than actually having one. My mum and dad were always running us about to training and if my dad was cooking it was always whatever is left in the fridge.
“But I think it is an investment in myself and it keeps me in the best possible condition. I am a big kid, so if I never had these things in place, the structure of Mikey in the house every night cooking me healthy food, I would pop to Nando’s every now and again. Unfortunately, he is a Coventry fan – he turned up one day in their kit – but we’ll let him off because we have a good relationship.”
McGinn is in typically good form, discussing everything from his contract extension until 2028, which would see him complete a decade at the club, a memorable first conversation with Unai Emery that left him on edge and a pre-season boot camp in Arizona, when Natalie Kollars, a performance specialist who works with NFL, NHL and UFC athletes, put him through his paces in the summer. “Aye, she absolutely beasted me! It was 45-degree heat. It was really, really tough. The benefits of that were that I came back in the best shape I’ve been in for a long time.”
McGinn, an endearing and self-deprecating character, was walking around Edinburgh’s fringe festival when the life-changing call came that Villa wanted to sign him from Hibernian. He has proven a £2.7m bargain. He helped Villa to the Premier League in his first season, scoring what proved to be the winning goal at Wembley, and to the heights of the Champions League quarter-finals last campaign, scoring against PSG at Villa Park. He turned 31 last month but is as central to the team as ever. He is vastly experienced and he acknowledges sometimes there is clamour for a younger model.
“I feel that every season, genuinely,” he says. “When you come down from Scotland, you always have a point to prove. You always feel like: ‘Can I compete?’ When you get older, each birthday actually becomes quite miserable because you think: ‘Oh no.’ My dad said: ‘What’s up?’ I said: ‘Well, I’ve hit the big 3-0.’ Each year I’ll have the same challenge, I’ll have someone younger or sexier, with a longer name or someone who has signed for £50m, but it just makes you that wee bit more determined to prove your worth. There will be a time at some point where I’ll have to hold my hands up: ‘All right, this player’s actually better than me’ or maybe the level does exceed me, but at this moment I don’t think that’s anywhere close and I’m determined to prove that.”
McGinn believes Emery’s trust helped shake the perception of him as purely “a grafter” and he remembers his first meeting with the manager, three years ago, like it was yesterday. “It was probably the most fascinating half an hour I’ve had in my career. [It was] the night before we played Manchester United and I hadn’t really spoken to him much. He told me I was maybe going to start, maybe not, so he kind of put me on edge. He said: ‘I’ve watched your last 10 matches in detail and [they were] not so good.’ But then he said: ‘Luckily for you, I’ve watched the 10 before and the 10 before that, so I believe you can be an asset to us.’ He judged with his eyes and he thought that I was worthy of staying around and not only that he kept me as captain. He has been incredible and hopefully over the next few years I can repay that.”
For now, McGinn’s focus is on Villa returning to winning ways in the Europa League against Maccabi Tel Aviv, a politically supercharged match. Villa, defeated at Go Ahead Eagles in their last match, are among the favourites to win the competition but, regardless of whether they achieve that ambition, McGinn believes they can return to the Champions League. He talks about how a trio of near-misses drive his – and Villa’s – desire to succeed; they lost the Carabao Cup final to Manchester City in 2020, for which McGinn was injured, came unstuck against Olympiakos in the Conference League semi-finals in 2024 and against PSG in the last eight in April.
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“They were big nights, big moments for us in which we haven’t delivered,” he says with searing honesty. “Every time we go into a big game now we have that determination in the back of our heads to prove this team we have built over the past five or six years is worth more than a quarter-final, worth more than a semi-final. The determination, I can feel it this year. I can feel we want to prove a point. I think until we do that there will always be questions. As captain you feel that probably twice as much but when that day finally comes you will feel it positively, twice as much.”
Next week, his attention will switch to Scotland’s crunch double-header against Greece and Denmark and qualifying for a first World Cup since 1998. “Hopefully I’ll be back in America for the World Cup, but if not I’ll be back there again,” he says of more training, after his longstanding agent challenged him to return on the first day of pre-season a different animal. Mission accomplished. “In the Premier League, everyone is getting so athletic. The challenge is to keep as close to them as possible. I’ll never be the fastest or the strongest, but I want to give myself the best chance.”
For club and country, he hopes the biggest moments are still to come. “It’s been an amazing journey and I have achieved so much, but everyone knows what would eclipse what we have already achieved,” McGinn says, alluding to Villa’s near 30-year wait for a major trophy. “If it takes me until I’m 37, 38, or even 40, I’m just so determined for that to happen. Aye, hopefully the best is yet to come.”
