Aston Villa midfielder Emiliano Buendía has spent a lot of the last few years waiting for a chance to impress. He is now taking his opportunity to great effect.
Emiliano Buendía has had to be patient.
For the past two and a half years, there has been an awful lot of waiting around.
There were 12 months on the sidelines after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in August 2023, and the long road back to fitness that injury brought.
Then, after he had recovered, last season he could not get into the team either at Aston Villa or on loan at Bayer Leverkusen. Despite being available and in matchday squads for most of 2024-25, he still barely played.
Jonny Whitmore / Senior Data EditorAfter returning from that unsuccessful spell in Germany, he endured a summer of speculation about his future this off-season. With Villa having failed to make it back into the Champions League, there was – as there is at every club – clamour for investment and improvement in the squad.
But restricted by the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability rules, Villa were hamstrung. Fans desperate for the club to spend any money on new signings were left almost completely disappointed.
Aside from £30 million forward Evann Guessand, Villa’s only summer signing who cost anything was back-up goalkeeper Marco Bizot, at around £500,000.
There was a bit of excitement late in the window when Jadon Sancho and Harvey Elliott arrived on loan given the success of bringing in Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio on short-term deals last season, but there remained an overriding feeling that Villa had failed to strengthen sufficiently. Many felt they were unprepared for another challenge for Champions League football.
Meanwhile, Buendía remained an afterthought. Given he had contributed next to nothing for two years, it hardly felt like he was going to be involved in any significant way this term. Reports suggested Villa were open to offers for him, and their financial predicament made an exit even more likely.
But the Argentine insisted in a meeting with manager Unai Emery that he wanted to stay and fight for his place. He impressed in pre-season and proved his fitness, and got his wish by staying. But even so, yet more waiting was on the cards.
He replaced the injured Boubacar Kamara in the defeat at Brentford on Matchday 2, but he was replaced an hour later by Guessand as Villa chased unsuccessfully for an equaliser.
There were a couple of starts in disappointing draws against Everton and Sunderland as Villa began the season with a woeful run of form, but Buendía was dropped for Villa’s next game, and another spell out of the team looked likely.
However, this time, he grabbed his opportunity, scoring one and setting up another within six minutes of appearing from the bench in a comeback win over Fulham to kickstart Villa’s season.
That was the first of a few major contributions he would make. He came off the bench to score the winner at Tottenham, and then started against Manchester City, setting up the eventual winner inside 20 minutes, shortly before being subbed off injured. He only missed two games this time – his injury record is remarkably good across his entire career, that ACL injury aside – and was brought straight back into the starting lineup once he was fit again. On his return, he scored the first goal in a 4-0 win at Bournemouth.
Then, this weekend, came a moment of pure release, as Buendía came off the bench late on in the meeting with Arsenal, and scored a dramatic, scrappy 95th-minute winner to send Villa Park ballistic. This was the moment he had been waiting for.
Coming after a manic goalmouth scramble and clocked at 94:03, Buendía’s goal was the second-latest winning goal scored against Arsenal on record (since 2006-07) in the Premier League, after Neal Maupay for Brighton in June 2020 (94:26). The Arsenal that Buendía had scored against are the frontrunners in the title race, the best team in the league and have an almost unbreachable defence. His goal has put them hot on Arsenal’s tails, and the nature of it – a sucker punch for the leaders and a rocket-fuel morale boost for Villa – has left some observers discussing Villa’s own title credentials.
A run of five wins in a row, and nine from their last 10, has thrust Emery’s men up to third in the table, just three points behind Arsenal, whom they face again later this month. If the gap remains at three points until then, that meeting will represent a chance for Villa to go level on points with first place, assuming the Gunners are still top.
Despite relatively little game time, Buendía has been integral to his side’s rise. With four goals, he is Villa’s joint-top scorer in league games along with Donyell Malen, and his total of six goals or assists is also their joint most alongside Morgan Rogers. Buendía has started only six league games and has played just 537 minutes of a possible 1,350.
But in that time, he has made a few telling contributions at key times in huge games, having either scored or assisted the winner against each of Spurs, City and Arsenal. His six goals or assists in Premier League games this season have been worth eight points; only five players have earned more, and all of them have played far more gametime than him.
He has been remarkably efficient with his time on the pitch. As well as Erling Haaland (1.26 goals or assists per 90), Buendía (1.01) is one of only two players averaging more than 1.00 goal contributions per 90 minutes played.
His four goals, meanwhile, have come from just 1.56 xG – only Richarlison (+2.83) and Bruno Guimarães (+2.8) can boast a better overperformance compared to their expected goals in the Premier League this season. That is helped by his ability to score from distance, as he did for his November goal-of-the-month winner against Spurs.
He combines his exceptional technical ability with a dogged work rate. On a per-90 basis, of players to play at least 500 minutes in the Premier League this season, only eight players have been involved in open-play shot-ending passing sequences more frequently than him (5.9) and, as the below graphic shows, it’s quite an impressive bunch of players ahead of him.
Meanwhile, again among players with 500+ minutes to their name, he ranks fourth behind John McGinn (1.09), Florian Wirtz (1.07) and Bukayo Saka (1.02) for the number of times he has won possession in the final third per 90 minutes (1.01). He also ranks 15th in the league for tackles per 90 (3.0), only just behind ball-winning maestro Moisés Caicedo (3.1), and fourth for fouls per 90 (2.4). Those stats prove just how ready he is to get stuck in.
It would be reasonable for Buendía, who insists he never considered moving away from Villa, to now hope – or maybe even expect – that a run of games could be on the cards.
“Always it was my preference to stay here because I really feel this club is my home and I feel myself close with everyone at the club,” he said earlier this season. “I think I can help this club to be even better in the future.”
Rumours of a new contract suggest the club are well aware of how much he has to offer, and particularly with both Sancho and Elliott contributing so little during their loan moves so far, Buendía could well play a prominent role as the fixture list piles up through December. If he does get to play more, the challenge will be to maintain anything like his impressive output over a more consistent run in the team.
On the international scene, meanwhile, he has been made to wait even longer for a reward. Having made his Argentina debut in February 2022, he earned his second cap in a friendly against Angola last month, as he appeared for his country for the first time in more than three and a half years. He will surely now have his heart set on earning a place in the squad at next summer’s World Cup.
Having appeared to be on the way out of Villa Park in the summer, few would have predicted 2025-26 would go this way for Buendía. He has had to wait his turn on all fronts, but his patience appears to be finally paying off.
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