In March 1888, twelve clubs sat down at the Royal Hotel in Manchester and invented the Football League. Two of them were less than four miles apart in the West Midlands. Aston Villa came from a working-class district north of Birmingham city centre; West Bromwich Albion played at a ground called the Hawthorns out where the Black Country pressed against the city. They were already rivals before the league existed -- they had met in the previous year's FA Cup Final, Villa winning 2-0 at Kennington Oval -- but the league made the rivalry permanent. For more than 135 years since, they have been playing each other in front of crowds who can name every grandfather who watched the same fixture.
The 1887 FA Cup Final was Villa's first piece of silverware. Archie Hunter, the captain, scored. Dennis Hodgetts added another. Hunter would soon become the first man to score in every round of a winning FA Cup campaign, a feat unmatched for over a century. Five years later, in 1892, the result reversed: West Bromwich Albion beat Villa 3-0 in their second Cup Final meeting. Then 1895 brought a third, Villa winning 1-0 in front of a crowd at Crystal Palace. Three Cup Finals between the same two West Midlands clubs in nine years -- a concentration of cup-final hostility that no other English rivalry has matched. The crowd's loyalties were already settled by then. Either you wore claret and blue, or you wore navy and white stripes, and the choice usually came down to which part of the suburb your family lived in.
The West Midlands does not have one derby. It has several, and they exist in a precise pecking order. Aston Villa's deepest enmity is reserved for Birmingham City -- the Second City derby, which divides the city of Birmingham itself. West Bromwich Albion saves its purest hatred for Wolverhampton Wanderers, the Black Country derby that splits the old industrial towns west of Birmingham. The Villa-Albion fixture sits in third place by intensity, ranked behind the other two in a 2010 Daily Telegraph survey. But third place in this region is still ferocious. The forward Cyrille Regis, who played for both clubs, drew the distinction with care: "Albion and Wolves are the only two teams in the Black Country, so that really is a local derby with local bragging rights at stake. But in our day, Albion versus Villa was always about being the best team in the Midlands."
A small group of footballers has worn both shirts, and the act tends to provoke a particular kind of fan reaction -- the cooled-off respect that follows the initial fury. Tony Morley played for both in the late 1970s and 1980s and won a European Cup with Villa in 1982. Liam Ridgewell crossed the line in the other direction. Cyrille Regis himself made the transition. Each was greeted, at the new ground, with a mixture of welcome and watchful skepticism. The Villa-Albion fixture is not the kind of derby where former players are openly hated forever; it is the kind where their first touch is studied closely, to see whether the new colours suit them. Most settle in. Football is, in the end, a job, and the Midlands respects work.
Modern Premier League economics have not been kind to either club. Aston Villa were relegated from the top flight in 2016. Albion followed two years later. In May 2019, both reached the EFL Championship play-off semifinals -- the matches that decide which side gets a chance to climb back up. They drew Villa-Albion, and the tie ran to a 2-2 aggregate over two legs before going to penalties at the Hawthorns. Villa won the shootout, advanced to the final at Wembley, and beat Derby County 2-1 to return to the Premier League. Albion stayed down. The semifinal carried a particular bitterness: a chance for one club to climb out of the second tier by stepping on the other. Some Albion fans still flinch at the date.
In the 2020s, a quieter and more modern phase opened. After Aston Villa hired Mark Harrison, the former West Brom Academy manager, Villa began signing a stream of young Albion academy players: Tim Iroegbunam, Rico Richards, Finn Azaz, Finley Thorndike, Jamaldeen Jimoh-Aloba. Around the same period, Villa picked up Louie Barry and Morgan Rogers, both former West Brom youth players who had taken longer routes between the clubs. The transfers caused predictable rage on the Albion side -- talk of a deliberate raid on the youth system, of poaching by a richer neighbour. Villa supporters celebrated each signing as both reinforcement and provocation. The rivalry continues to find new fronts. The grounds still sit four miles apart. The trophies still date to the 1890s. And the children growing up in West Bromwich and Aston are still picking sides, the way their grandparents did.
The two grounds sit roughly 4 miles apart in the West Midlands. Villa Park is at 52.51N, 1.88W in Aston; the Hawthorns is at 52.51N, 1.96W in West Bromwich. Nearest airports: EGBB (Birmingham, 6nm SE), EGBE (Coventry, 22nm ESE), EGOC (RAF Cosford, 14nm W). Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 ft AGL with the M5/M6 motorway interchange providing the navigational anchor between the two stadiums.