Player #892 for Aston Villa, Aaron Tshibola, played as a midfielder for the club in 2016-17, making 10 appearances, scoring once.

Tshibola was born in Newham on 2 January 1995 and was signed from Reading under Roberto Di Matteo for £5,310,000 on 10 July 2016 in what was a remarkable fee for a player who had made just 13 appearances in the second tier.

Di Matteo gave Tshibola his debut appearance for Villa on Sunday, 7 August 2016, aged 21, in the opening day Championship defeat at Sheffield Wednesday, with Tshibola coming on as a 70th-minute substitute for midfielder Gary Gardner.

Tshibola would make his first start for the club in the following game in the EFL Cup 1-3 loss to Luton Town, but would retain his starting position for the next two Championship games before injury ruled him out of first-team contention.

On Tshibola’s return, Di Matteo was in the death throes of his short Villa reign, and Tshibola would make just one further start under Di Matteo but by then he had already scored his first - and only - goal for Villa in the 88th minute of the Championship game at Newcastle United on Saturday, 24 September 2016 after coming on as a half time substitute for Nathan Baker.

New Villa boss Steve Bruce would start Tshibola in his first match in charge, but he failed to impress and as a result would not feature in the team for the next three months before returning for three games in early January 2017.

Shortly thereafter, Bruce, still unimpressed with Villa’s €6m signing, sent the player out on loan to Nottingham Forest for the remainder of the 2016-17 campaign.

For 2017-18, Bruce would send Tshibola out on loan to MK Dons until November 2017 and then from January 2018 until the end of the season to Kilmarnock.

By the time of Dean Smith’s arrival as Villa boss following Steve Bruce’s dismissal, Tshibola had once again been sent on a season-long loan to Kilmarnock.

With Villa’s re-emergence as a Premier League team in September 2019, Tshibola had not made a first-team appearance since January 2017, over two and a half years earlier, and had never featured under Dean Smith. It was a surprise, therefore, for Tshibola to be named in the squad for the 6-1 EFL Cup win over Crewe Alexandra on Tuesday, 27 August 2019. Tshibola didn’t make an appearance.

Shortly after, Tshibola moved on to Waasland-Beveren in August 2019 for an undisclosed fee, aged 24, having made 10 appearances and scoring once in four seasons on the books of Villa. Clearly not the wisest €5.90m the club had ever spent.

Tshibola had made his final appearance for Villa on Saturday, 14 January 2017, aged 22.

Tshibola played under Roberto Di Matteo and Steve Bruce.