When English football club Aston Villa paraded their long-awaited European trophy through the streets of Birmingham aboard an open-top victory bus on Thursday, thousands of kilometers across the African continent, a matching celebration was already underway. A local supporters’ group in the tiny Ghanaian village of Juaben marked the club’s historic end to a 41-year European trophy drought and 30-year overall title drought with their own homegrown parade – 30 decorated motorcycles leading a packed minibus that mirrored the main event held half a world away.
Aston Villa secured their landmark 3-0 win over German side SC Freiburg at Istanbul’s Besiktas Park on Wednesday, clinching the Europa Conference League title and snapping a dry spell that stretched all the way back to their 1996 League Cup victory. The milestone sent shockwaves of joy through the club’s global fanbase, but nowhere was the emotion more palpable than in Juaben, a village that boasts an unlikely community of roughly 1,000 diehard Villa supporters organized into the fan group the Ghana Lions, led by lifelong fan Owusu Boakye.
“Yesterday was one of the best moments of our entire lives – there could never be a better time to be an Aston Villa supporter,” Boakye shared with BBC ahead of the village’s celebration. “We’ve rented 30 motorcycles to ride through every corner of our community, and we’re using our own minibus just like the first team is doing in Birmingham today. We can’t wait to see the whole village chanting and sharing this joy together.”
Juaben’s generations-long love affair with Aston Villa traces back to Boakye’s grandfather Daniel, who developed an affection for the Midlands club while staying with a Villa-supporting family that originally hailed from Birmingham. “When we were growing up, he would sit us down and tell us story after story about Aston Villa’s history and legends,” Boakye explained. “He always talked about one player he called ‘God’ – that was Paul McGrath.”
McGrath, the iconic Irish defender who made more than 250 appearances for Villa between 1989 and 1996, was part of the 1996 League Cup-winning squad that lifted the club’s last major trophy before Wednesday’s win. For decades after that victory, successive generations of young Juaben villagers grew up hearing tales of Villa’s glory, waiting patiently for their own moment of celebration to arrive. That moment finally came when goals from Youri Tielemans, Emi Buendia and Morgan Morgan Rogers sealed the win over Freiburg in Turkey.
“It was absolutely incredible – this is a moment to remember for a lifetime, having the whole community come together for Aston Villa,” Boakye said. “When Villa won their first European Cup back in 1982, almost none of the fans who celebrated with us yesterday had even been born. We’ve been waiting our whole lives to make our own history, and now that day is finally here.”