Player #930 for Aston Villa, Björn Engels, played as a centre back for the club in the 2019-20 season.

Björn was born in Kaprijke, Belgium, on 15 September 1994 and made his Villa debut appearance at the age of 24 in the opening day Premier League match with Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday, 10 August 2019.

Villa had signed Björn from Stade de Reims on 16 July 2019 for a fee of £7,200,000, with the player having only signed a permanent deal with Stade de Reims just weeks earlier in a £3.6m move from Olympiacos Piraeus.

Engels began the season as first-choice centre back partner to Tyrone Mings and started the first 11 Premier League games of the season before injury kept him out of successive matches in November 2019. First Ezri Konsa, and later Kortney Hause, prevented Engels from regaining a regular starting place, and he would only make a further 5 league appearances through to March 2020.

By that time, Dean Smith had switched Villa to a three-man defence occupied by Mings, Konsa and Hause, with Engels missing from the squad entirely for a 5 game spell in early 2020.

On his first league start in 2020 on Sunday, 16 February 2020, Engels scored his first goal for the club, but in the last seconds of a tight contest with Tottenham Hotspur, his error allowed Spurs to break away and score to consign Villa to an unlucky defeat. Whilst Engels was retained in the squad, he was relegated to the subs bench before appearing at Wembley in the EFL Cup final on Sunday, 1 March 2020.

Engels returned to the league line-up for the following game ahead of the suspension of football due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and on football’s return in June 2020, Engels was absent due to injury to the season end.

In his debut season with the club, Engels had made 17 Premier League appearances.

Engels’ injury absence continued into the 2020-21 campaign, and he didn’t appear in the squad until Sunday, 18 October 2020, where he was an unused substitute - a role he would continue for three successive matches. Engels was then not selected in the squad for the next four games before returning to the squad for the final games of 2020.

Engels, by the turn of the year into 2021, had made no appearances in the 2020-21 campaign with his last appearance for the club having come on Monday, 9 March 2020; however he took his lack of game time in good spirit:

“I am not unhappy,

“My children are happy here, my partner is happy here, and I am actually happy here myself. At the club, I get along well with everyone, and everything is fine.

“Last week, the fantastic new performance centre was officially opened by Prince William, who is a proper Aston Villa fan.

"Everything went very well (at Villa) until I started struggling with some injuries after the lockdown last year. As a result, a part of my first season was already destroyed.

"Because the team has been performing well, I can't get in. But I'm going to keep fighting to regain my place. It's natural that teams don't change a central defender quickly, and, normally, I would have played against Liverpool in the FA Cup, but then our coronavirus outbreak happened and we all had to be quarantined with the under-21s playing instead.

“But, like I’ve said, there is so much quality in the core of the squad here that they don’t worry if someone drops out. Villa just put someone else in, and, if it does well, the team stays as it is. In addition, each club has some absolute top players. With us, they are Ollie Watkins, a fantastic striker, and Jack Grealish, our captain and the best player I’ve ever played with. Everything goes without saying for him.

“Training’s very competitive as well, sometimes with words and a riot, but that is just part of it. The team spirit is very good. A lot of jokes are made. Banter, they call it here. We tease each other!

“But, overall, I can put things into perspective much better. When you come home and see your two children, you turn the switch, and you are there for your family. The only thing I miss here are playing minutes, but I put that aside more easily than I used to.”

“Like I said, we’re happy here, so it’s not like I absolutely want to leave. By the way, my son has already registered to go to school here in September. The only thing I’m missing at the moment is playing minutes. If that doesn’t change next season, I’ll have to look for where to find it elsewhere.

“I get messages from friends telling me that Belgian media are suggesting that I will return to the Belgian league, but at the moment, there is absolutely nothing concrete. They also know that, as a family man with two small children, I am not reluctant to be closer to my family after this year of coronavirus, but then the whole picture has to be right.

“Normally, there is someone from my circle of family and friends here every game, but now for almost a season, nobody could come. I find this very difficult, certainly also with the birth of my daughter, and that makes you think about your future. I am really looking forward to returning to Belgium after the season and to be able to introduce my four-month-old daughter to family and friends for the first time.”

“The absolute highlight was, of course, the League Cup final at Wembley against Manchester City, where I almost scored the equaliser at the end.

“My debut at Tottenham in front of sixty to seventy thousand people in that new stadium was also such an unforgettable moment. Just like my first home game against Everton, my first win with Aston Villa. That was on a Friday night, and the atmosphere was the best I have ever experienced. In the return match against Tottenham, I scored my first goal, 2-2, a great moment, but, in injury time, I made a mistake and it became 2-3. It can be that fast in this competition, from up to down. You also learn from that.

“But you have to accept that and keep going. That mistake against Tottenham was a very painful moment. The next game, at Southampton, I was not in the team, but the next week in the cup final, I was again. You have to be mentally strong.”

“Marvelous has done a great job every time he’s played or come in.

“But, when the team is performing, the coach sticks to his regular eleven as much as possible.

“Wesley fell out of the team against Burnley early last year after a very dirty tackle with a horrific injury, the worst knee injury I ever saw.

“Anything that could have been torn off was broken. That boy suffered tremendously during his entire long rehabilitation. I saw him every day at the club and I have to say: chapeau that he has been training with us for several weeks now. He was also rewarded for that with two short appearances. He still needs some time, but with his cast-iron mentality, he will definitely be back.”

“Hey, if I had to know, it would be easy. I just want to keep fit and to play matches again. (After leaving Brugge) I achieved my goal of playing Premier League football, and, no, I certainly do not rule out that I will ever be able to play for Club Brugge again.

Engels would leave the club in July 2021 without adding to his 19 appearances in 2019-20.