In Gameweek 4, 66.5% of the top 968 FPL managers in the Overall rankings owned Cole Palmer. Across the entire game, only 26.8% did. That is a 39.7-point gap between the sharpest squads and everyone else, and it is one of the widest ownership splits of the season so far.
Start with what kind of pick this is. At 9.7m, Palmer is not a cheap enabler bought to free up funds for someone else. He is a genuine mid-price differentiator, and by Gameweek 4 he had 26 points on the board for the season. A gap this size on a player at this price means the elite found conviction the wider game had not caught up with yet.
The mechanism is not mysterious once you look at his role. Palmer is Chelsea's penalty taker and their creative focal point, operating just behind the front line. Through the opening gameweeks he had nine shots in the box, second only to Erling Haaland among all players, and he had racked up 21 fantasy points for the season, level with Joao Pedro. In midweek he added a two-goal cup performance in a 6-3 win over Leeds, on top of a league record of two goals and an assist.
Then came the fixture that decided Gameweek 4 itself. Chelsea hosted newly promoted Hull City, having scored ten goals across their previous two home matches and gone unbeaten in ten league meetings with Hull. That is the kind of match-up sharp managers build a captaincy case around, and 48.9% of the top sample gave Palmer the armband that gameweek specifically. That figure describes one gameweek's decision, not a running rate across the season — it is the single biggest tell in the data that this was a fixture-driven conviction play, not blind loyalty to a name.
So why did three in four managers across the wider game leave him out? The likeliest explanation sits in last season. Palmer picked up a groin injury in August 2025, tried to play through it, and reaggravated it in a defeat at Manchester United that September. Chelsea's manager, Enzo Maresca, ruled him out for six more weeks and admitted he had misjudged how fit Palmer really was. A 9.7m midfielder who spends a chunk of the previous campaign in and out of a treatment room is a harder sell to a manager working with one team and limited free transfers, even once he starts a new season fit and firing. The elite sample, watching him day to day, moved past that scare faster than the field did.
The projection engine's own numbers add a useful check on how far to take this. Heading into that Gameweek 4 fixture, Palmer was projected 3.91 points per gameweek on 84 minutes, filed in the 'rated' tier rather than the top bracket. The model gave him just an 8.7% chance of a genuine haul and put his chance of blanking at 62.9%. Those numbers describe a boom-or-bust profile — capable of a two-goal burst against a promoted side, just as likely to go quiet against a well-organised defence — which is exactly the shape of his season so far: a blank against Arsenal sandwiched between goal contributions elsewhere.
None of this proves Palmer is now undervalued property for the rest of the season. The ownership gap tells us where conviction sat for one gameweek and why: a friendly fixture, a central attacking role, and a squad of managers less spooked by an injury history than the average FPL manager. It does not tell us his fitness will hold, and the engine's own high blank rate is a reminder that even the players the elite back most heavily do not return every week. Watching whether that ownership gap survives a tougher run of fixtures will tell you more about Palmer than this single gameweek can.