Making the short journey from Wolverhampton Wanderers to Aston Villa is central midfielder Joao Gomes.
He joins the Villans in a £38m deal.
The 25-year-old is a Brazilian international, originally from the Flamengo academy. He helped Rubro-Negro win the 2022 Copa Libertadores before moving to England in January 2023.
Although Gomes came off the bench to score a winner on his Premier League debut, goals aren’t really his thing. He’s racked up only seven strikes and five assists across three-and-a-half seasons:
Instead, he’s impressed many with his ball-winning and carrying skills – even if his enthusiastic tackling has brought at least nine yellow cards in each full campaign.
DEFCON POTENTIAL
2025/26 was Gomes’ best Fantasy Premier League (FPL) term. The introduction of defensive contribution (DefCon) rewards took him beyond 100 points for the first time.
A spell of nine DefCon returns in 14 matches from Gameweeks 12 and 26 helped him finish as the joint-fifth best midfielder for those (30 DefCon points).
He averaged 12.31 actions per 90 minutes, and delivered DefCon points in 15 of his 32 starts (46.9%):
Above: FPL midfielders sorted by defensive contributions per 90 minutes
Game time may not be a problem at Villa, as the combination of Amadou Onana (injury), Youri Tielemans (sold) and Morgan Rogers (imminent sale) situations means they need to stock up on midfielders.
VILLA – DEFCON DODGERS
However, as a team, the Villa way of playing doesn’t suggest there’ll be an increase in rewards for Gomes. By a distance, they accumulated the fewest DefCon points of all 2025/26 teams.
Gomes will be playing for a team seeing more of the ball than Wolves did last season. Aston Villa were ranked sixth for possession (53.8%) in 2025/26, with Wolves down in 19th (42.3%):
Gomes might still do better than the likes of Onana and Tielemans, even in a side like Villa’s. He won more tackles as a percentage (63.6%) than any of Villa’s midfielders in 2025/26, for instance:
All in all, unless Gomes has a very low starting price (even lower than the £5.5m he started at a year ago) that makes it okay to subsist on a drip-feed of DefCon, FPL managers will likely look elsewhere. Even then, he may not match last year’s DefCon tally. Ideally, you’d want some semblance of attacking threat – eg Elliot Anderson, Anton Stach – with your defensive contributions, too.
FIXTURES
As for early fixtures, our Ticker believes Villa have an ok-but-not-brilliant start. However, their runs between Gameweeks 3 and 6, then Gameweeks 11 to 15, have potential.
