Brighton scored four in 31 minutes, and Villa lost Joao Gomes before half-time
Aston Villa conceded four times inside the opening half hour at the Amex and finished the first half a man down. Brighton won 4-0 on the first weekend of the season.
Aug 23, 2026
Aston Villa’s season lasted eight minutes before it started going wrong, and 31 before it was over. Brighton beat them 4-0 at the Amex on Sunday, scored all four goals inside the opening 31 minutes, and had a man advantage to play with by the 40th.
Four goals in 23 minutes
Victor Lindelof turned the ball into his own net in the eighth minute. Maxim De Cuyper struck the second in the 18th, set up by Georginio Rutter. Jack Hinshelwood took twelve more minutes to head in the third, and about sixty seconds after that to score the fourth.
That was the match. Brighton did not score again and did not need to. Everything that decided the afternoon happened between the eighth minute and the 31st, in front of a Villa defence that had been rebuilt over the summer and looked exactly like a defence that had been rebuilt over the summer.
Joao Gomes went off in the 40th minute
Gomes arrived from Wolves in July as part of Unai Emery’s midfield refit. His Premier League debut for the club ended before half-time, sent off for kicking out at Rutter, and it left Villa a goal short of humiliation and a man short of a contest.
There was no route back from that. Villa played the second half with ten men and four goals down, in the first fixture of a season they enter as Champions League qualifiers, having finished fourth last May.
The centre-back they sold this week
Arsenal completed a 51 million pound deal for Ezri Konsa two days before this match. The timing is the sort of thing that only looks bad afterwards, and then looks very bad indeed. Villa spent the summer selling well and buying often, moving Morgan Rogers to Chelsea, bringing in Johan Manzambi from Freiburg for a club-record 59.5 million, adding Gomes, and taking Alejandro Garnacho on loan.
None of that is obviously wrong. Squads get remade, and Villa’s business this summer was mostly good business. What a 4-0 on the opening weekend exposes is that the remaking has not yet produced a back line that holds, and Emery has to build one now, in public, with the noise that follows a scoreline like this.
Brighton got the afternoon they wanted
Fabian Hurzeler’s side finished eighth last season, four places and twelve points behind the team they just took apart. Hinshelwood scoring twice in two minutes was the sort of passage Brighton have built a decade of Premier League football on, and this is their tenth season in the division without a break.
Whether it means much by November is another matter. Opening weekends flatter and mislead in roughly equal measure, and one afternoon against a side that lost its shape and then its discipline is thin evidence either way.
Villa’s problem is more immediate. Emery has a defence to sort out and a suspension to absorb, and the fixture Gomes will miss is at home to Arsenal on 31 August, against the club that spent the week buying his centre-back.