Cole Palmer's armband edged out João Pedro's by the width of an eyelash in Gameweek 4. Among the 990 managers Bawler tracks at the top of the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings, 43.5% gave the captaincy to Palmer and 41.2% to his Chelsea team-mate — the tightest split in this sample all season. Those same managers averaged 100.8 points in the gameweek, well clear of 69, the average score posted across every manager in the game.
The closeness makes sense once you look at how the two are scored. Palmer plays as a midfielder, so a goal is worth five points instead of four, and he picks up a point whenever Chelsea keep a clean sheet — he also takes the penalties. João Pedro doesn't get the clean-sheet bonus as a forward, but he delivered more on the pitch: our figures show he accounted for 145.1% of the points the sample scored this gameweek, a share that counts a captain's total twice and can run past 100% as a result. Palmer's share was 111.1% — still strong, just smaller.
Erling Haaland and Alexander Isak were the other big captaincy calls in the sample, taken by 9.1% and 1.8% respectively; Haaland was on 84.7% of the week's scoring, Isak just 28.6%. Bukayo Saka picked up 0.9% of armbands and an 11.8% share. Morgan Rogers, Chelsea's other in-form attacker, was captained by only 2.3% of the sample — despite being the gameweek's most heavily bought player in the transfer market.
Rogers was the standout name among the buys. Chelsea paid a club-record fee, reported at £117m, to sign him from Aston Villa in July, and by Gameweek 4 he was owned by 67.1% of the top 990 against 38.2% of the wider game. Among sample managers who made a transfer this week, 61% brought him in — the highest share of any player. He now sits alongside Palmer and João Pedro in a three-man Chelsea attacking core that dominates ownership inside the elite sample.
The second most-bought name was another big-money summer arrival: Ezri Konsa, who joined Arsenal from Villa for a reported £51m. He went into 36.4% of transferred-in slots this week and is now owned by 42.3% of the sample against 18.3% of the wider game. Arsenal's defence already carries heavy elite backing through Riccardo Calafiori (89.7% owned in the sample) and David Raya (65.3%), and Konsa's arrival adds to that concentration.
Brighton's Pascal Groß and Maxim De Cuyper carry the widest ownership gaps in this week's figures — the difference between how much of the elite sample owns a player and how much the wider game does. Groß is owned by 73.7% of the top 990 against 19.5% of everyone else, a 54.2-point gap, the largest of any player. De Cuyper's is 41 points (65.1% against 24.1%). Neither was this week's top buy, but both were picked up by around a quarter of transferring managers.
Selling was concentrated at Manchester United. Bryan Mbeumo (40.2%) and Bruno Fernandes (37.1%) were sold by more transferring managers than anyone else in the sample. United have taken four points from their opening four league games and were knocked out of the League Cup by fourth-tier Grimsby this month. Both players' ownership gaps were tiny before this week — 0.9 and 0.6 points — meaning they had been popular with the elite sample and the wider game alike right up until now. Team-mate Harry Maguire, who has eight points all season, was cut by 18.3% of transferring managers.
Manchester City's Iliman Ndiaye, a reported £65m signing from Everton barely a fortnight old, was the third most-sold player at 18.4%, just ahead of Leeds' Dominic Calvert-Lewin (18.1%) and Brighton keeper Bart Verbruggen (16%). Calvert-Lewin's case looks less like a verdict than squad churn: he's still owned by 54.5% of the sample even after the sell-off. Rayan Cherki and Cody Gakpo close the list, and both already carried negative ownership gaps — the elite sample owns less of them than the wider game does, by 23.5 and 5 points — so this week's selling reads as a continuation of an existing fade rather than a new one.
Chip activity was heavy. Nearly a quarter of the sample, 24.1%, played their wildcard in Gameweek 4, well ahead of the triple captain (14.6%), bench boost (5.5%) and free hit (3.9%). Outside of that, the sample mostly held its nerve: managers made 0.92 transfers on average, and only 1.7% paid a points hit to squeeze in an extra move. A wildcard wave alongside modest activity everywhere else reads as squad repair, not panic chasing of a single gameweek return.
None of this is a forecast. It's a record of what the best-performing managers in the game did at the Gameweek 4 deadline, built from reading the squads of the top 990 in the Overall rankings against ownership across the whole game. A player bought or captained by that group is a signal worth weighing, not an instruction — fixtures, form and fitness can all change before the next deadline.