Last updated: 24 August 2026

MLS Fantasy Football Week 21: David Villa Leads the Picks

Major League Soccer was entering a fascinating period when this Fantasy Sports Portal selection was originally published in 2015.

New York City FC had assembled one of the most recognisable groups of players in MLS history, with David Villa joined by European stars Andrea Pirlo and Frank Lampard.

Our Week 21 fantasy football analysis identified Villa as the player most likely to benefit from New York’s attacking potential, while fixture strength and projected team goals played an important role in the remainder of our selections.

The fantasy platform and individual fixtures belong to another era, but the analytical principles behind the selections remain highly relevant: expected goals, home advantage, player involvement, clean-sheet probability and identifying where a team’s attacking potential is concentrated.

David Villa Was the Standout MLS Fantasy Pick

There was considerable excitement surrounding New York City FC.

The arrival of Frank Lampard and Andrea Pirlo added two enormous names to a squad already containing Spanish World Cup winner David Villa.

Lampard was approaching his first MLS appearances, while Pirlo’s arrival provided New York with another elite creative midfielder.

Our headline fantasy selection, however, was Villa.

The reasoning was based not simply on reputation but on opportunity. New York carried one of the strongest attacking projections of the weekend, and Villa was the player most likely to convert that team potential into goals and fantasy points.

That distinction remains important in fantasy football today. Predicting that a team will score is only the first part of the problem. Managers must then identify which players are most likely to be directly involved in those goals.

MLS Week 21 Fantasy Forwards

Villa led our attack alongside Bradley Wright-Phillips of the New York Red Bulls and Vancouver Whitecaps forward Octavio Rivero.

Neither Wright-Phillips nor Rivero ranked among our very highest-rated forwards overall, but their fixtures appeared favourable and both had home advantage.

This demonstrated an important distinction between long-term player rankings and short-term fantasy selection.

The best player over an entire season is not necessarily the best player for one particular round of fixtures. Opponent strength, venue and expected minutes can temporarily make a lower-ranked player the stronger selection.

MLS Week 21 Fantasy Midfielders

Our projections gave New York one of the highest goal expectations of the weekend, which made doubling up on their attacking midfield attractive.

Felipe Martins and Dax McCarty were therefore included in midfield.

Montreal Impact’s Ignacio Piatti also made the selection after continuing to provide attacking returns, while Philadelphia Union midfielder Vincent Nogueira completed the four-man midfield.

The logic behind selecting multiple players from the same team is still familiar to modern fantasy managers.

When a particular club has an unusually strong attacking projection, concentrating selections around that team can produce significant upside if the forecast proves correct.

MLS Week 21 Fantasy Defenders

Orlando City defenders Seb Hines and Sean St Ledger both ranked highly among our defensive options, so we backed Orlando to keep things tight against FC Dallas.

Eric Gehrig of Chicago Fire completed the defence.

Defensive fantasy selection has always involved a slightly different calculation from choosing attacking players.

Individual quality matters, but clean-sheet probability depends heavily on the entire team. Opposition strength, home advantage and the likelihood of conceding therefore become particularly important when comparing defenders.

David Ousted in Goal

Vancouver Whitecaps goalkeeper David Ousted received our goalkeeper selection after producing a series of impressive performances.

Ousted had also developed a reputation for saving penalties, providing another possible route to fantasy points beyond clean sheets and routine saves.

Goalkeepers can be difficult fantasy assets to predict because they sometimes benefit from facing more shots rather than fewer.

A goalkeeper playing behind an excellent defence may have a better clean-sheet probability, while a busier goalkeeper can accumulate save points and occasionally produce a much larger individual return.

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Looking Back at David Villa’s MLS Impact

With the benefit of hindsight, selecting David Villa as the focal point of New York City’s attack was hardly misplaced.

Villa became one of the defining players of the club’s early MLS years and established himself as one of the league’s outstanding forwards.

He scored 80 regular-season MLS goals for New York City FC and won the league’s Most Valuable Player award in 2016.

The arrival of players such as Villa, Pirlo and Lampard also represented an important stage in MLS’s development and international profile.

For European football followers, these signings created considerably more interest in MLS and introduced many fantasy players to clubs and players they might otherwise have followed only occasionally.

Fantasy Football Was Already Using Expected Outcomes

Perhaps the most interesting part of this archive article is not the individual Week 21 selections but the method used to identify them.

The original analysis referred to New York having the highest goal expectancy among the teams under consideration.

Today, expected goals (xG) is a routine part of football broadcasting, journalism and supporter discussion. Expected assists (xA), shot quality and increasingly sophisticated probability models are also widely available.

Fantasy football analysis was already moving in that direction years earlier.

Rather than simply asking which footballers were the biggest names, fantasy managers were trying to estimate how many goals teams were likely to score, which sides were most likely to keep clean sheets and which individual players were best positioned to benefit.

The terminology and data have become more sophisticated, but the fundamental question remains unchanged: what is most likely to happen in the next match?

Why This MLS Fantasy Analysis Still Matters

The specific Week 21 contest is long finished, but the selection process remains applicable to modern fantasy football.

Fixture difficulty, home advantage, expected team goals, clean-sheet probability, attacking involvement and player value continue to shape fantasy decisions across FPL, MLS Fantasy and other formats.

That is why historical fantasy football analysis can remain useful long after the fixtures themselves have disappeared.

The players and competitions evolve. The underlying problem — predicting football more accurately than everybody else — remains much the same.

Explore more: Football analysis and features from Fantasy Sports Portal.