Gameweek 2 was decided in one line of the team sheet. Bawler tracks the squads of the top 997 managers in the overall Fantasy Premier League rankings every night, and this week 98.6% of them put the captain's armband on Bruno Fernandes. Across a sample of nearly a thousand of the best-ranked teams in the game, that is about as close to unanimous as FPL captaincy gets.
More striking still is how far some of them went. Fantasy Premier League gives every manager two Triple Captain chips across the season, one to use before the halfway point and one after, and 577 of the 997 managers in the sample — 57.9% — used their first one on Fernandes this week. A Triple Captain multiplies a player's score by three instead of the usual two, so getting the pick wrong is expensive. Almost six in ten of the game's best-ranked managers judged the risk worth taking, and they still have a second Triple Captain banked for later in the season's first half.
The scale of that conviction shows up in the numbers around him. Fernandes' share of the sample's total scoring in Gameweek 2 alone came to 256% — a figure that can run past 100% because a captain's points are counted twice, and tripled again for anyone who chipped on him, so one big haul spread across almost the entire sample adds up fast. It followed a mixed run with the penalty spot: Fernandes had missed one for Manchester United earlier in the season, away at Fulham, before scoring a stoppage-time winner against Burnley. That is the kind of moment that keeps a captain's price stable even after a public miss.
The contrast with Erling Haaland is the other half of the story. Haaland is still owned by 71.5% of all 13 million-plus FPL managers, easily the most popular premium forward in the game, but only 29.8% of the top 997 hold him, and just 0.6% gave him the armband this week. The best-ranked managers were not just picking a different captain to the crowd — they were carrying noticeably less Haaland altogether.
Squad activity, by contrast, was quiet. The sample made an average of just 0.27 transfers each, and only 1.5% took a points hit — the four-point deduction charged for each transfer beyond a manager's free allowance. Where there was movement, it mostly topped up players already held from Gameweek 1. Bryan Mbeumo (owned by 75.3% of the top sample) and Dominic Calvert-Lewin (72.4%) each saw only marginal fresh buying, 1.8% and 1.7% respectively, having already been the elite's Gameweek 1 picks — Mbeumo after a Player of the Month August following his move from Brentford, Calvert-Lewin settling in at a newly promoted Leeds. Benjamin White was bought and sold by an identical 1.8% of the sample, the classic split when a defender's game time is in question; Arsenal's ongoing right-back rotation with Jurrien Timber is the likely reason.
Selling told a smaller story of trims rather than exits. Iliman Ndiaye was sold by the most of the sample, 1.9%, though 42.4% of the top managers still hold him against 12.7% of everyone else. Bart Verbruggen, previously owned by 66.3% of the sample, was moved on by 1.2%, and Richarlison, down to two points all season, was sold by 1.5%. Yoane Wissa and Rayan Cherki drew the most fresh buying of any outfield names bought this week, 2.6% and 1.6%, but both remain under-owned next to the wider game — the top sample is still lighter on them than the average manager, so these read as watch-list moves rather than the crowd's next big thing.
None of this is a script for Gameweek 3. It is a record of what the best-ranked 997 managers in the game actually did at the last deadline, when their sample averaged 129.1 points against 81 across the whole game — a 48.1-point gap. The armband, not the transfer market, is where that gap opened up.