🦁 Premier League Player of the Week: At home in the Midlands | OneFootball

Was this the most consequential weekend of Premier League football this season?

It seems the relegation places are sorted and the title has been sewn up, and there were a host of individual performances that got our attention on a remarkable match week.

So with that in mind, our Premier League Player of the Week is ...

Marco Asensio (Aston Villa)

If you'd have told Aston Villa fans at the start of the season that by the end of February both Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio would be forming one of the division's best partnerships for their club, they might have thought you were mad.

In fact, if you'd have told them the same thing in the middle of January, some men in white coats might have been on their way.

And yet here we are, two of Europe's best - and at times most inconsistent wingers - have been the new darlings of Villa Park in the space of just a few short weeks.

It says much about the transformation at Villa under Unai Emery that these two world class wingers would try to revive their careers in the west Midlands when moves to sunnier climes were surely in the pipeline.

Such is the pull of Emery though, and the way he has made every player in this Villa squad better, that it already seems like a natural fit for both men.

It was Asensio who provided the match-winning touches this past weekend and Asensio who just pips his team mate to our Player of the Weekend award.

The three points against Chelsea took Villa back up to eighth in the table and with 12 games of the campaign to go, sees the club back to within reach of a potential Champions League place next season.

That looked way off at the start of 2025 with the club struggling under the weight of a two-pronged season.

Villa's European adventures had been an undoubted highlight but it was clear that their midweek exertions had neutered their domestic fortunes.

But the addition of Asensio, Rashford and Donyell Malen has added a new dimension to their attack.

Never was that more evident than on Saturday evening as Enzo Maresca's Blues came to town.

Chelsea took the lead inside 10 minutes as Enzo Fernández tapped in, and it could have been more for the away side were it not for some lacklustre finishing from Cole Palmer.

Villa rallied late on however with Asensio grabbing his first by ghosting into the penalty area and bundling home after a nice cross from Rashford.

The duo then teamed up again as the former Manchester United man found the ex-Real Madrid attacker from a corner and Asensio fired in past the beleaguered Filip Jörgensen for a late winner.

"What a night! Feeling at home already!" Asensio wrote on social media after the game and it doesn't take too much imagination to envisage the on-loan forward putting down permanent roots in Birmingham very soon.

📸 Alex Pantling - 2025 Getty Images