The FPL Stock Report: Why you must sign these Aston Villa and Spurs stars for Gameweek 9 now

Another Fantasy Premier League deadline is fast approaching – it’s at 11:00 GMT Saturday morning ahead of Chelsea v Manchester United, for those of you who have a habit of forgetting them – and with it comes the usual string of difficult decisions.

That’s why we’re back with our semi-regular FPL Stock Report to recommend some players you should sign and sell ahead of Gameweek 9. We’re looking for players whose form, fixtures and underlying stats either suggest a likely upswing in scoring or an imminent drop-off.

Sometimes players will continue to shine or struggle against the odds – we can only apologise for recommending Gonzalo García a few weeks ago, the logic was sound – but these are our best informed guesses for the differentials you should sign and the widely-owned players you should move on from.

The FPL assets you should sign from Aston Villa, Bournemouth – and Spurs?

Johan Manzambi & Nicolas Jackson: We’re going to start with two recommendations that could be considered to be statements of the obvious, given that both players have gone up in price over the past week – but Aston Villa have turned a corner and their two best attacking assets are in seriously impressive form.

Villa are entering a very generous run of fixtures, and the numbers behind both players are compelling: Jackson has five in five, and the only red flag is that his four Premier League goals have come from 1.98xG, which probably isn’t sustainable, especially for a player whose relationship with the xG model hasn’t always been very impressive.

Manzambi, meanwhile, has three goals and an assist in his last five and seems to be involved in just about everything that Villa do in the final third. When players are on great form, and play for teams who are on great form, it’s usually best to snap them up, especially when they’re both cheap.

Evanilson & Rayan: It’s a similar story with Bournemouth, who like Villa seem to have woken up after a slow start to the season and who also enter a run of pretty easy fixtures, at least by Premier League standards. The time is ripe to pick some Cherries.

Evanilson can be a frustratingly inconsistent forward, but has scored three in a row and after this weekend’s home game against Leeds he’ll be up against some of the weakest defences in the top flight.

Rayan, meanwhile, is a player we picked out in pre-season as a potential star for his price – he, too, has finally found some form, has been excellent in recent weeks, and at £6.3m has bargain potential. He’s averaging 0.6 combined expected goals and assists per 90 minutes since the international break, with two goals to his name. Not bad at all.

Pedro Porro & Jan Paul van Hecke: We find it hard to believe that we’re recommending that any FPL players sign Tottenham Hotspur assets, but he we are – Spurs seem to have turned a corner since the break, and are about to embark on a run of five consecutive fixtures against teams with indifferent or simply downright bad attacks.

Spurs, meanwhile, have tightened up considerably at the back and have kept their opponents’ xG below 1.0 for each of their last three games. Of their defensive assets, Van Hecke – who has hit defcon points three times – and Porro, who has attacking potential, have the highest ceilings and have both suffered price drops to keep their fees nice and competitive. We can’t really blame anyone for avoiding Spurs like the plague, but the incentive is there.

Manchester United & Chelsea players you should sell in the FPL

Bruno Fernandes: We’re likely stating the obvious again, here, but 24% of FPL players still have Fernandes in their team, and that’s 24% too many. We don’t even know if he’ll play, although he and Michael Carrick did reportedly hold ‘clear-the-air talks’ after a turbulent week.

Fernandes hasn’t scored or assisted since Gameweek 2 and has below 0.3 combined xG and xA in total in his last three matches. That’s awful at any price, but at £11.7m, keeping him in your team is just a mistake. He’s this season’s Mohamed Salah, but far worse. Perhaps he’ll get back to his best later in the campaign, but for now we’d steer well clear. The same logic, by the way, says that you should sell Morgan Gibbs-White.

Cole Palmer: With João Pedro likely to miss a few games and Chelsea playing extremely poorly against Spurs last weekend, it’s reasonable to expect a downturn in attacking returns for a little while – but while Morgan Rogers has been consistently good since moving to Stamford Bridge, Palmer has gone back off the boil again.

He did pick up a pair of assists against Bournemouth a couple of weeks ago, but that came from an xA of 0.07 and he’s averaging below 0.3 combined xG and xA per 90 minutes since Gameweek 3. That’s below par for his price tag. Just contrast that form with Rayan, who’s putting up twice the strength of statistical performance and at a fraction of the cost. Keeping Palmer isn’t a terrible plan, and Chelsea’s fixture difficulty isn’t bad for the next few weeks, but you may be able to get more bang for your buck elsewhere.

David Raya & Riccardo Calafiori: Raya and Calafiori are the best goalkeeper in the game and one of the best defenders respectively, so we certainly aren’t suggesting that they should be out of your team for any length of time – but Arsenal have a couple of tricky fixtures coming up, and will do well to keep two clean sheets from their next four, which is sort of the bare minimum you need given these players’ price tags.

Calafiori is also carrying an injury into the weekend and knowing Mikel Arteta, it’s unlikely that we’ll get a clear idea of whether or not he can play before the deadline. His price is set to drop thanks to that uncertainty, and we wouldn’t mind following the crowd on that for once. He can come back in after the game against Manchester City in Gameweek 12, perhaps. Ezri Konsa, by the way, is cheap enough that he’s worth keeping around.