Should you sell Aston Villa defender Ezri Konsa after red card vs Newcastle? FPL dilemma solved

It wouldn’t be a brand new Fantasy Premier League season without millions of managers getting a headache on the very first weekend, and this season it was Aston Villa’s Ezri Konsa providing the pain.

The defender is currently owned by just over 20% of FPL players but was sent off during the second half of Villa’s 0-0 draw with Newcastle United and now faces a suspension. Consequently, more than 200,000 managers have already sold him – but should you follow suit, or should you hold on? As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert (and one of the many unfortunate Konsa owners), it’s my job to figure that out…

Why selling Ezri Konsa in the FPL is a mistake – even if his price drops

While Konsa’s red card is a frustration, it’s important to note that he will only be banned for one match due to the nature of the offence – and the reasons that he was in so many teams in the first place hold true.

Aston Villa have a relatively gentle run of fixtures to start the season and Konsa was owned by so many FPL managers because he had every chance of going on a run of clean sheets while picking up the occasional defensive contribution bonus. He will now miss the trip to Brentford, which is a definite annoyance, but he will still be back to play Crystal Palace and Fulham at home along with Everton and Sunderland away in the four weeks that follow.

It’s also worth noting that Villa, as a group, provided us with plenty of encouragement by keeping a clean sheet against Newcastle. Their defence wasn’t the most consistent in the 2024/25 season, so immediate returns on that front are promising and suggest that more clean sheet points will await patient players who hang on to Konsa for the medium term.

Of course, there is another consideration, and that’s Konsa’s price. Should the number of managers transferring him out continue to increase, he could easily drop to £4.4m and stay there without some big returns after the Brentford game, damaging teams’ economies and making later transfers a little trickier.

As it stands, online price change predictors seem to think that his value is holding, but that may change and such tracking software is never guaranteed to be right – only the people running the FPL have access to all the data.

Even if he does suffer a price drop, however, Konsa shouldn’t be a player that his owners are looking to transfer out for at least a couple of months anyway, and using a free transfer so early, on a low-value position, is rarely the right move. Should an expensive forward or midfielder go down injured or get sent off next week, then burning a transfer now may cost you the capacity to make better moves.

There is no reason to believe that Konsa’s returns won’t be rock solid for the first quarter of the season or so based on what we’ve seen, and no reason to change out mind about his likely output – and it’s only worth using transfers when it seems likely to significantly change the points totals we can expect to score. That isn’t the case with the Villa man, and Konsa owners should stay the course.

Is a Gameweek 2 bench boost a reason to sell Konsa?

There’s a caveat to that advice, however, which is that a popular strategy identified by many FPL managers for the start of the season is to use the first of their two bench boost chips in Gameweek 2 – for players who have that plan in mind, selling Konsa is arguably a necessity.

The idea behind bench boosting so early is that it allowed players to build a squad with it in mind from day one while taking advantage of what should be the best home game for Burnley’s cheap defenders and goalkeeper, Martin Dúbravka, against Sunderland.

There’s certainly no point in using the Gameweek 2 bench boost if you still have Konsa in your squad. That would be a waste of a key chip, so the question is whether it’s worth sticking to the bench boost plan or simply to abandon it altogether.

I’m leaning towards the latter as it stands, partly because it avoids burning a transfer in a way that was otherwise needless and partly because Burnley will be heading into their game against Sunderland having just taken a pasting from Tottenham Hotspur, while Sunderland beat an established Premier League team 3-0. Taking form into account, this might not be the best time to try and get some points for Dúbravka or Estève after all.

It may be better to wait for Burnley’s defence to get their bearing in the top flight, and perhaps their Gameweek 8 match against Leeds United at Turf Moor will be a better fixture to target. Or it may turn out that their defence isn’t as solid in the Premier League as may have been hoped, and it’s best to save the bench boost to tie it with the first wildcard, a common strategy before FPL doubled the number of chips players could use.

The bench boost on Gameweek 2 strategy remains valid and shouldn’t be ignored by players who set their team up for it, but the Konsa owners among them should question whether a transfer is worth it when the player is likely still a good asset for many weeks to come and when there will be other chances to bench boost later. My opinion is that it’s better to hold Konsa for now and look for another opportunity to use your chips later on.