Bawler reads the squads of the top managers in the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings every night. After Gameweek 1 of 2026/27, the top 994 in that sample averaged 105.9 points, more than double the game's average score of 50. Part of that gap is squad quality. A large part of it is one specific chip decision, which we'll come back to.
The clearest signal from the sample sits in the armband. João Pedro was captained by 31.4% of the top 994, comfortably the most popular pick, ahead of Haaland on 20.4% and Cole Palmer on 14.1%. Because a captain's score counts twice, João Pedro's afternoon accounted for 134.2% of the entire sample's Gameweek 1 scoring — a share bigger than the whole gameweek, driven by how many of the 994 doubled his points.
The reason is straightforward. João Pedro scored against Fulham inside 31 seconds — the fastest opening-day goal in Premier League history — on Xabi Alonso's first match in charge of Chelsea, with Cole Palmer providing the assist. Owned by 97.2% of the top sample against 67.6% of the whole game, a 29.6-point gap, he was already the obvious armband choice for this sample, and the goal landed before most managers had finished their coffee.
Haaland tells the opposite story. Manchester City needed a stoppage-time Josko Gvardiol goal to beat Bournemouth 2-1, and Haaland spent the afternoon missing the chances that normally go in — a glancing header saved before half-time, a shot blazed over after it. He finished with 2 points: appearance money and nothing else. One in five of the top 994, 20.4%, still gave him the armband, and his double-counted return added up to 68.1% of the sample's scoring — a big number only because so many managers backed him, not because he did anything with it.
Zoom out from the armband and the ownership list shows where the top of the table diverges from the rest of the game. João Pedro's 29.6-point ownership gap over the wider game is the headline, but it isn't even the largest. Cole Palmer is owned by 57.5% of the top sample against 15.3% of everyone else, a 42.2-point gap, the widest of any player in the data. Riccardo Calafiori (72% v 41.6%, a 30.4 gap) and Bart Verbruggen (51.4% v 21.5%, a 29.9 gap) show the same pattern: the best-performing managers concentrated hard on a handful of Chelsea, Arsenal and Brighton picks the rest of the game hadn't caught up on.
The best individual score in the whole dataset belonged to neither captain. Maxim De Cuyper, Brighton's £4.6m full-back, was pushed into an auxiliary left-wing role and returned a goal, an assist, a clean sheet and two bonus points: 17 points, the highest of any player Bawler tracked this week. He was owned by 47.2% of the top 994 against just 7.5% of the wider game, a 39.7-point gap, and no captain went near him. A reminder the armband isn't the only way a gameweek gets won.
Haaland is the one name in the most-owned list the top sample actually avoided relative to the field: 47.8% ownership among the top 994 against 68% across the whole game, a gap of -20.2. The best managers were already more cautious on the world's most expensive player before a ball was kicked. This week that caution looked justified. One gameweek doesn't make the case on its own.
There's no transfer story to tell yet. Average transfers made across the sample was zero and nobody took a points hit, normal for a Gameweek 1 squad, which is a team-selection exercise rather than a transfer decision. The buying and selling picture starts properly from Gameweek 2.
Chip use, by contrast, was extreme. 833 of the 994, 83.8%, played Bench Boost in Gameweek 1, banking every point from all 15 players rather than the usual 11. That isn't unusual this season: across the whole game, more than 814,000 managers did the same, a record for the gameweek and more than double the 342,779 who did it in Gameweek 1 last year. FPL gives every manager two Bench Boosts across the season, one for each half, so cashing the first one in the week every squad is fresh and rotation risk is lowest is a well-worn plan — the top sample just leaned into it harder than most. A further 104, 10.5%, went further still and played Triple Captain in week one.
Which brings the season-average number back into focus. The top 994 outscored the field by more than two to one, 105.9 points against 50, but with 83.8% of them counting a full 15-man squad instead of 11, some of that gap is the chip talking, not just the picks. It's still a strong start. It just isn't a clean measure of squad-building skill on its own.
None of this is a forecast. It's a record of what the top of the Fantasy Premier League table did at the Gameweek 1 deadline: who they trusted with the armband, who they left out, and how the numbers around Chelsea, Brighton and Man City played out once the whistle went. What they do with their transfers from here is a different question, and one Bawler will be tracking gameweek by gameweek.