AVL: Team Insight

Aston Villa's attack is worth buying into. Their back line is a harder sell.

The read: our model has Villa among the six best attacks in the league, and the next six games line up kindly for goals — Brighton away, Arsenal at home, Hull away, Forest at home, Spurs away, then Brentford at home. Three home games against beatable sides plus a trip to Hull is the kind of run that turns a good striker into a very good one.

That striker is Ollie Watkins at £8.0m, and he's clearly our top pick here. We've got him down for roughly four to five points a game across the next six — a solid haul most weeks — and he's the sort of forward who can go massive when Villa click, with penalties and a settled starting spot behind him. Only around 1 in 8 managers own him, so there's still room to get ahead of the crowd rather than just keep up with it.

The nuance, and it matters: the defence and the attack are on completely different fixture paths. Villa's back line is genuinely good — comfortably top-half in our numbers, closer to the top third — but the clean sheet run ahead is rough. Brighton away, Arsenal, Spurs away and Brentford is not a shutout-friendly stretch. Emiliano Martinez at £5.0m is our preferred defensive route, and almost nobody has him (well under 1 in 10), but we've got him closer to two or three points a week than anything spectacular. Ezri Konsa at £4.5m is fine and already owned by about 2 in 10, with Matty Cash a touch behind him. John McGinn's numbers look tidy for £5.5m, but our model ranks him last of this group for a reason — the midfield returns are spread thin and there are better ways to spend that money.

FPL VERDICT — Buy Watkins. At £8.0m he's the cheapest reliable route into a top-six attack with a run of fixtures this friendly, and the ownership is low enough to be a real move. Hold Konsa if you already have him; he's cheap enough not to hurt. Watch Martinez rather than buy — revisit him once the Spurs and Arsenal games are out of the way. Avoid McGinn. And keep Watkins in the captain conversation for the Hull and Forest weeks.