Aston Villa
Villa Park
Aston Villa FPL: Who To Own, Captain And Avoid
The call — Aston Villa: A Team You Buy One Player From, Reluctantly Emi Buendía takes Villa's penalties, their free kicks and a share of their corners. Every dead ball this club wins runs through one £6.0m midfielder that hardly anyone owns. That's the entire attacking case for Villa in one sentence — and it still isn't the pick our model likes most.
What has not being with FFIQ cost you this season?
One squad, picked before a ball was kicked and run for six gameweeks on three transfers — no hits taken. Scored on FPL’s own results.
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Let's be honest about what's on offer here. This is a side ranked among the league's bluntest attacks — 17th of 20 — with a defence not much better at 16th, heading into a run that does them no favours at either end. Hull away is the soft landing; after that it's Forest, Spurs away, Brentford, Newcastle away and Manchester City. Nobody is buying Villa players for the fixtures. So the question is purely a value one: who plays every week and what does £4.5m actually buy?
The answer is Matty Cash. He starts, he doesn't rotate, and he's on corners, which is how a full-back in a middling defence earns his keep when clean sheets are scarce. He's not going to haul — a couple of points most weeks is the honest expectation across this run — but at £4.5m with fewer than 1 in 10 managers owning him, he's the enabler who lets you spend properly elsewhere. That's the whole job description, and he does it.
Buendía is the more interesting shape of pick — roughly 3 points a week projected, the full set-piece portfolio, and ownership so low he's basically yours alone. On his day, a free kick or a penalty turns that into a proper score. The caveat writes itself: he's attached to the league's 17th-ranked attack facing Spurs, Newcastle and City. You're buying the set pieces, not the team.
Everyone else in the cheap ranks — Maatsen, Pau, Suzuki, Kamara — starts, which is more than most £4.5–5.0m options can say, but starting behind this defence against these opponents is not a clean-sheet business plan.
The call: don't build around Villa — the fixtures and the ranks tell you not to. But if your bench needs a body that actually plays, Cash at £4.5m is the buy. Buendía only if you've got a spare slot and a taste for set-piece lottery tickets. Everything else, leave on the shelf.