Gameweek 4 produced an almost even armband call for FPL's elite. Among the 989 managers Bawler tracks at the top of the Overall Rank, 43.5% gave the captaincy to Cole Palmer and 42.1% to his Chelsea team-mate João Pedro — a gap of just 1.4 percentage points between the two most popular picks.
The match did not split so evenly. Chelsea were held 2-2 at home by an unbeaten Hull City: Morgan Rogers put the hosts ahead inside seven minutes, Mohamed Belloumi scored twice to turn it around, and João Pedro equalised in the 66th minute from a Cole Palmer assist. João Pedro's owners banked a goal; Palmer's banked an assist. That shows up in what Bawler calls 'share of this gameweek's scoring' — how much of the sample's total points a player was responsible for in Gameweek 4 alone, with a captain's points counted twice. João Pedro's owners took 146.1% of that measure; Palmer's took 111.5%. The armband vote was almost evenly split. The scoring wasn't.
Erling Haaland tells the opposite story. Only 8.6% of the sample captained him, despite City's forward being owned by three in four managers (75.2%) — the away Manchester derby was judged too risky to double up on. City won it 1-0 at Old Trafford despite Phil Foden's 23rd-minute red card, and Haaland scored the only goal: his ninth in the fixture, enough to make him the competition's all-time leading derby scorer. It delivered an 83.9% share of the week's scoring for his owners, a big return for a captaincy few were prepared to trust.
The buying was dominated by two Aston Villa old boys settling in elsewhere. Villa's summer was a wholesale rebuild: Rogers, Ezri Konsa, Youri Tielemans, Lucas Digne, Emiliano Martínez and Ollie Watkins all left the club. Rogers, now at Chelsea in a club-record £117m deal, was bought by 61.1% of the sample this week — more than any other player — and scored Chelsea's opener against Hull to repay some of that faith. Konsa's move to Arsenal, filling in for the injured William Saliba and Jurrien Timber, brought in 35.8% of the sample at a modest FPL price of £4.5m. His ownership among the sample sits 24.5 points clear of his ownership across the whole game, marking him out as a genuine differential at the back.
Brighton supplied the sharpest differential of the week. Pascal Groß was bought by 24.9% of the sample and was already owned by 73.6% of it — 55.5 points clear of his ownership across the whole game, the widest gap of any player bought or sold this week. He justified it: a goal and two assists, including a converted penalty, as Brighton beat Coventry City 5-0. Team-mate Maxim De Cuyper rode the same fixture into 24% of the sample's transfers.
Manchester United supplied the sell list. Bryan Mbeumo (39% sold) and Bruno Fernandes (37.7%) were the two most-dropped players in the sample, as United lost the derby 0-1 at home and Mbeumo — now without a league goal in eight games — was substituted with an injury. Neither sale was really a contrarian call: both are owned by the sample at almost exactly the rate they're owned across the whole game, so this reads as the sample cutting a losing position alongside everyone else rather than getting ahead of it. Dominic Calvert-Lewin, sold by 17.7%, is a different case. He was still owned by 54.2% of the sample going into the gameweek — a much heavier position than most of the names sold this week — and a forward with his injury history is always worth watching closely.
Chip activity was unusually heavy. Nearly a quarter of the sample (23.6%) used their wildcard at the Gameweek 4 deadline, 15.1% fired the triple captain, 5.8% went for bench boost and 4.2% played free hit. Add it up and close to half the sample played a chip in a single week — consistent with squads being reshaped around the Villa exodus and a run of standout fixtures, rather than routine use.
Transfers themselves were modest by comparison: the sample made 0.94 changes each on average, and only 1.7% paid a points hit to make an extra move, so most of the rebuilding went through a wildcard rather than a hit. It worked out: the sample averaged 100.8 points in Gameweek 4 against 67 for the average FPL manager, a gap of 33.8 points. This is a record of what the best-ranked managers in the game had done by the Gameweek 4 deadline — not a forecast of what they'll do next. Ownership and captaincy can, and do, move again before Gameweek 5.