Every night, Bawler reads the squads of the top 1,000 managers in the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings and counts what they own, captain and buy. That sample sits against 13,107,732 people who played FPL in 2025/26. At the Gameweek 38 finish, the top 1,000 averaged 62.6 points that week, against 41 across the whole game. That 21.6-point gap did not appear from nowhere. It was built, player by player, across a season, and the ownership numbers show exactly where.
Their average squad was worth 104.1m at the end. That is not dramatically different from a well-run team lower down the rankings. The difference was never really how much they spent. It was which 104.1m they spent it on.
Start with the closest thing to a universal pick. Bruno Fernandes was owned by 99.6% of the top 1,000, against 48% of everyone who played, a gap of 51.6 points of ownership. At 10.4m he returned 235 points, the highest of any player in this sample, and he was also the armband of choice: 41.4% of the top 1,000 captained him, comfortably their most common single call. Gabriel was the next closest to universal. The Arsenal defender was owned by 94.5% of the top 1,000 against 45.4% of everyone, and delivered 209 points from a 7.3m defender. Both of these were picks the wider game largely made too, just later and less completely. The real story of this season sits further down the list.
Nico O'Reilly is the clearest example of the top 1,000 finding a player before his price caught up. He began the season as a fringe option at Manchester City and ended it as Young Player of the Season, one of only three City players to log more Premier League minutes than Bernardo Silva and Erling Haaland, and scored twice in the EFL Cup final. At 5.3m, he returned 160 points. The top 1,000 owned him at 80.2%, against 19.2% of everyone else, a 61-point gap in ownership terms, the second-widest of any player in this dataset.
Jarrod Bowen tells a similar story further forward. The West Ham forward was owned by 73.6% of the top 1,000 against 17.5% of everyone, and he was also their second most common captaincy pick at 22.3% of weeks. That matters just as much. It shows the top 1,000 were not simply loading up on Bruno and hoping. They rotated the armband toward whoever the fixtures and form favoured that week.
The single widest ownership gap in the whole sample belongs to a goalkeeper who scored 71 points all season. Karl Darlow was owned by 72.1% of the top 1,000 against just 6.9% of everyone else, a 65.2-point gap. That is the classic pattern of an enabler: a cheap goalkeeper who plays every week and does not actively cost points, freeing up budget for the two 14m-plus forwards further up the pitch. Bart Verbruggen at Brighton did the same job at 4.6m and 130 points, owned by 68% of the top 1,000 against 9.3% of everyone, a 58.7-point gap. Two cheap goalkeepers, near-universal at the top of the game, barely present anywhere else.
Not every cheap, widely owned pick was purely functional, though. Jan Paul van Hecke, Brighton's 4.7m defender, was owned by 71.3% of the top 1,000 against 10.7% of everyone, a 60.6-point gap, and returned 148 points along the way. Van Hecke was a genuine goal threat from set pieces, which turned a budget defensive pick into real production. Dominic Calvert-Lewin did the equivalent job further forward. Leeds' 5.8m striker scored 14 league goals in a revival season, was owned by 68.1% of the top 1,000 against 13.7% of everyone, and returned 142 points. Marcus Tavernier at Bournemouth, 5.3m and 137 points, was the largest gap of any midfielder outside Bruno: 59.4% of the top 1,000 against just 4.2% of everyone.
Not every gap ran in the top 1,000's favour, and it is worth being honest about that. Antoine Semenyo was owned by 54.4% of the top 1,000 and 46.2% of everyone, a gap of only 8.2, on 202 points at 8m. Here the wider game got there almost as fast as the elite did. Agreement is still information, even when it is not a differential.
The more interesting disagreements run the other way: players the wider game kept faith with long after the top 1,000 had moved on. Marc Guéhi shows the widest gap in this direction, at minus 25. Just 7.6% of the top 1,000 owned him against 32.6% of everyone, despite 179 points at 5.1m. Guéhi's move from Crystal Palace to Manchester City only happened in the January window, prompted by injuries to Josko Gvardiol and Ruben Dias, which left his route into City's side less settled than his reputation suggested when most squads were built. Virgil van Dijk shows a comparable pattern: 11.7% of the top 1,000 against 31.5% of everyone, a gap of minus 19.8, on 175 points. Declan Rice (6.6% against 23.3%), Morgan Rogers (2.8% against 20.2%), Micky van de Ven (1.5% against 17.6%), Martin Dúbravka (8.3% against 25.7%) and Marc Cucurella (0.9% against 14.6%) all followed the same shape: well known, widely owned by the crowd, largely absent from the top.
Bryan Mbeumo is the clearest case where the ownership gap lined up with what happened on the pitch. Manchester United's 8.3m signing was owned by just 0.7% of the top 1,000 against 15% of everyone, a gap of minus 14.3, and finished on 148 points. He started well enough to win a Player of the Month award in August, then went without a Premier League goal from early February onwards. The top 1,000 were never heavily invested in him even at his best; a chunk of the wider game bought the price and the headlines and held on regardless.
The armband tells one more useful story. Erling Haaland was captained in 18.5% of weeks by the top 1,000, despite being owned by fewer of them (51.6%) than of everyone else (62.5%), a gap of minus 10.9. Even the most obvious captaincy name in the game was not a lazy default at the top; it was used selectively. Mohamed Salah is the counterpoint that keeps this data honest. He was owned by more of the top 1,000 than of the crowd (27.9% against 15.2%, a gap of plus 12.7) and captained in 10.2% of weeks, despite a quiet season that returned only 123 points from a 14m price. The best managers in the world trusted him more than the wider game did, and for once that read did not pay off in points. Omar Marmoush, low-owned everywhere (9.6% against 2.9%) and captained in just 2% of weeks, was a fringe, spike-week option rather than a season-long trust.
Formation choice fits everything above. 3-4-3 was the top 1,000's most common shape, used by 43.5% of the sample, with 3-5-2 second at 24.8%. Together, more than two-thirds of the top 1,000 played some version of a back three. Standard 4-4-2 was third at 21.3%, with 4-3-3 (8.6%) and 4-5-1 (1.2%) rare. A back three is exactly the shape that lets a squad carry Gabriel, O'Reilly and Van Hecke at once, while still affording Bruno, Bowen and a recognised forward further up the pitch.
None of this is a script for the season ahead. A gap this season shows the top 1,000 were early or right on a particular name, not that the same name repeats the trick next time round. What it does show is where 13,107,732 squads actually split from the 1,000 at the very top: not on the players everyone already knew about, but on the cheap goalkeepers, the breakout defenders and the reputations they were willing to let go of before the points caught up with the price.