Villarreal Arrive in Form as Alaves Host a Side That Cannot Stop Scoring
Marcus Vale ·
Last updated 14 August 2026. With a little under a fortnight remaining before the ball rolls on this La Liga Friday night encounter, the picture is already coming into focus, and what it reveals is a contest shaped by a very clear imbalance in attacking momentum. Deportivo Alaves host Villarreal at the Mendizorrotza on 28 August, and while the season is barely breathing yet, the form lines that stretch back through the previous campaign and into these opening weeks tell you something genuine about what to expect.
The Weight of Last Season
Context matters enormously at this stage of a campaign, because the new season has produced so little data that last season's fingerprints are still everywhere. What people do not understand is that a team does not simply reset in July. The habits, the rhythms, the vulnerabilities, they carry forward into the autumn before new ideas have time to take root.
Villarreal finished third in La Liga last season, 72 points from 38 matches, 22 wins and 72 goals scored. That is a side of genuine quality, a side accustomed to playing at a level that demands technical intelligence and creative courage. They conceded 46 times, which speaks to a certain openness, a willingness to impose themselves rather than simply contain. Their football has always carried that spirit, and you see it reflected in their numbers.
Alaves, by contrast, finished 14th with 43 points, winning 11 and losing 17. They scored 44 goals but conceded 56, and that defensive generosity is something any visiting side with real quality will be aware of. The gap between these clubs last season was not merely positional. It was philosophical.
Early Season Signals
Villarreal have played one competitive match in this new campaign, and the result was extraordinary. A 6-0 victory, clean sheet, no ambiguity whatsoever. One match tells you nothing by itself, and I would never build a conclusion on a single result. But the manner of a performance like that does carry meaning. A team does not score six goals and keep a clean sheet through accident. There is intent behind it, sharpness, the kind of collective confidence that a good pre-season builds and a big victory reinforces.
Alaves, meanwhile, show a more textured picture across their recent form. Over their last ten matches in all contexts, they have won four, drawn three and lost three, scoring 18 and conceding 18. Perfectly balanced, perhaps, but that equilibrium conceals something more revealing when you look at their home record specifically. In their last five home matches, they have won twice, drawn once and lost twice, conceding nine times. Their home clean sheet percentage sits at just 20 percent over that stretch, and both teams have scored in 80 percent of those games.
What people do not understand is that a home record like that is not simply bad defending. It is a structural invitation, a signal that this pitch, against this crowd, produces open football. Games here breathe. And when you bring a Villarreal side carrying the momentum of a 6-0 opening win into an environment that tends to open up, the conditions for goals are already present.
Head to Head: A Small but Telling Sample
These sides have met only twice in the recorded head-to-head, and the results are instructive. Villarreal have one win and one draw, scoring four goals to Alaves's two. Both teams scored in both meetings, which maps cleanly onto the broader pattern we see in Alaves's home form. The most recent encounter, in March of this year, finished 1-1, a result that confirmed both the competitiveness of Alaves and the reliability of goals in this fixture.
The average of three goals per game across their meetings is a relatively modest number, but the universal presence of goals on both sides is the detail that lingers. Alaves have yet to keep a clean sheet against Villarreal in this sample. Not once.
Villarreal's Injury Concerns
A note of caution is required here, because Villarreal are carrying significant injury problems into this fixture. Four players are currently listed as out, two of them with long-term injuries carrying no expected return date at all. A third long-term absentee has a tentative return date of 31 August, meaning they will miss this match entirely. A fourth player with a moderate injury also has 31 August listed as their expected return.
In my time as a player, you understood quickly that the squad you had available shaped everything. A manager could have the most beautiful idea about how the game should be played, but if the players who made that idea possible were sitting in the treatment room, you adapted or you suffered. Four absences at this level is not a crisis, but it is a disruption, particularly when the season is so young that replacements have not yet found their rhythm within the team's system.
Whether those missing players are central figures or peripheral ones, the data does not tell us. That uncertainty is itself a reason to approach this match with measured care rather than certainty.
The Broader Picture and What It Suggests
Alaves have shown something mildly encouraging in their recent away form, winning twice in their last five on the road, but their home performances tell a different story this season. They are a side that plays on the front foot at Mendizorrotza, possession sitting around 50 percent, but their defensive record at home has been poor. They create chances. They concede chances. The football is alive but not controlled.
Villarreal, despite those injury concerns, arrive as the side with greater individual quality and the momentum of a dominant opening performance. Their attacking output over the last ten La Liga matches showed 21 goals scored, and their shot volume has been consistently high. This is a side that comes to take the game to you, and they do it with craft and belief.
The beautiful game does not always reward the beautiful team, and I would not be so naive as to suggest that quality alone decides a Friday night La Liga encounter in front of a passionate Alaves crowd. But the evidence gathered here, the home defensive record, the head-to-head pattern, the class differential between a third-placed and a fourteenth-placed side from last season, points in one clear direction.
Villarreal are the better side. They should win this match. And if the history of this particular fixture means anything, goals will arrive at both ends before the evening is done.