Emiliano Martinez insists he wants to end Aston Villa ’s trophy drought after claiming quitting for a Champions League club would be “too easy”.
The Argentine World Cup winner this week added FIFA's best goalkeeper award to his own trophy haul. Martinez, who was superb in the final against France in Doha, has been tipped for a possible summer exit from Villa in search of Champions League football.
But the shot-stopper ,30, signed for £20million from Arsenal in September 2020, has suggested he is willing to stay and help new Villa boss Unai Emery land the club’s first major silverware since 1996.
Martinez said: “I want to achieve something that no one achieves or it's been hard to achieve. People were saying, after the Copa America after the World Cup, Emi is going to go and play Champions League and he’s going to leave.
“And I'm thinking, yeah, that's the easiest part. You know that that's easy leaving now to a club playing the Champions League. It seems everything is easy but actually, it was a real challenge for me.
“Winning a World Cup for Argentina after 36 years? Yes. Beating the champions of America after 28 years in the Maracana? Yeah, that was a challenge. Winning the final against the champions of Europe was a challenge.
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“And now we need something for Aston Villa after 30 years. That’s a challenge. And that's something I’m made for - for challenges, for not always having the easy way out.
“We’ve got one of the best managers for winning things in Europe. So I'm up for the challenge."
Villa, who are 11th in the Premier League, host Crystal Palace on Saturday in their latest season without a trophy. Unai Emery's side defeated Everton last weekend, with the Spaniard admitting his side desperately needed a win.
"We needed to win. We had to win in our way. We reacted very well to some moments we were struggling, trying to break the pressure. We were feeling better on the pitch after the first goal," he told Match of the Day.
"We were trying to keep our balance. I think the only real strange, the real bad performance was against Leicester. Manchester City were better than us, Arsenal were good as well. Maybe we could have taken more points against Arsenal but they were better than us.
"Now our challenge is at home, how we can control the game better than we are doing. We have to think about each match how we can face it. Perfect today. It was really good how we reacted after three matches we lost.
"We have to be realistic. We are winning, we are losing. At the beginning it was trying to be top 10. We have to win more matches. [We'll] try to create, to build a team to build a small family between us."
