Three players Aston Villa could sell in January including £40k-a-week man

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No club strengthened their starting XI quite as efficiently as Aston Villa during the summer transfer window.

But while Matty Cash, Emi Martinez, Ollie Watkins and Ross Barkley have strolled into Dean Smith’s first-team without breaking sweat, others have stumbled into insignificance quicker than an X Factor winner.

Here are three players who could leave Villa Park in January.

Trezeguet

We’ll allow you a little peak behind the curtain here.

Two weeks ago, when the initial draft of this piece was drawn up, we assumed that the out-of-favour, out-of-sorts Anwar El Ghazi was facing an uncertain future at Villa Park.

How wrong we were.

After a winner at Wolves, a confident performance against Burnley and two more goals in Sunday’s 3-0 win at West Brom, the Moroccan is suddenly one of the first names on Smith’s team-sheet.

Now, it is Trezeguet who appears to find himself on the outside looking in. During the Egyptian’s injury-enforced absence, El Ghazi has re-established himself in the starting XI and, with Bertrand Traore starting to impress as well, it is difficult to see how Trezeguet gets back in.

Patience in the £9 million man was already wearing thin after a couple of horror misses. Is El Ghazi’s sudden resurgence the final straw?

A penny for the Moroccan’s thoughts as Trezeguet, the man who has seized his place in Dean Smith’s XI, slices aimless shot after aimless shot into the Holte End.

Henri Lansbury

Lansbury gave up the captain’s armband to join Aston Villa in a £3 million deal back in 2017.

Four years later, while his bank balance has swelled considerably, there is a nagging feeling that the one-time Arsenal starlet has wasted his peak years welded to the Villa bench. Since the start of 2017/18, the now-30-year-old Lansbury has started a grand total of nine out of a possible 139 league matches.

With his £40,000-a-week contract due to expire next summer, January feels like the ideal time for both parties to part ways.

Especially with the highly gifted Jacob Ramsey threatening to push Villa’s forgotten man further down the pecking order.

Frederic Guilbert

Most teams expect to have two reliable players for each position these days. Three, however, feels a little greedy. Especially when it is Aston Villa we’re talking about; a team who don’t have the rigours of European football to worry about.

Guilbert was a regular in Smith’s XI last term but, in the blink of an eye, the £3.5 million Frenchman has gone from first-choice right-back to third, behind Ahmed Elmohamady and the £15 million Matty Cash.

He may have more rough edges than a chainsaw but the swashbuckling Guilbert is far too talented to sit at home every weekend. He has been omitted from every Premier League squad this season and, if Villa don’t want him, there will be plenty of clubs willing to offer a good home to an exciting if erratic wide man.