Bruno Fernandes sat in 99.6% of the squads inside FPL's top 1000 last season. Across the rest of the game — all thirteen million-odd managers Bawler tracks — only 48% carried him. That's a 51.6-point gap between the sharpest end of FPL and everyone else, on a single player, for an entire season.
At £10.4m, Fernandes was not a cheap pick. He sits near the top of the midfield price bracket, and that matters: a near-universal hold among elite managers on an expensive player, against barely half that ownership everywhere else, is not the pattern you see with a budget enabler bought to free up funds for a front three. This was a genuine call the best managers made and stuck with, while roughly half the game hung back.
The hesitancy is understandable given the context. Manchester United's season under Ruben Amorim was choppy from the start, and results were bad enough that the club sacked him in early January, with Darren Fletcher stepping in as interim manager. Backing the most expensive midfielder in a side under that sort of pressure, when goals and points don't always follow the performances, is a harder sell for most FPL managers than backing the same profile of player in a settled, winning team.
Fernandes' underlying job barely changed through the upheaval, though. Amorim had said before the season that he'd previously had to drop his captain deeper to help build attacks, pulling him away from the box — and that the summer arrivals of Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo were there to fix exactly that. Fernandes also kept his penalty duties throughout, with Amorim publicly backing him to stay on spot-kicks even after he missed against Fulham and Brentford. Penalties, corners and a captain's share of a team's chances are the sort of things that show up in underlying data long before they show up reliably on the scoresheet — which is precisely what an elite-ownership sample and a projections model are built to notice early.
By the end of the season, the numbers had caught up with the reputation. Fernandes finished with 235 points and a Premier League-record 21 assists, breaking the mark of 20 jointly held by Thierry Henry and Kevin De Bruyne, with nine more assists than the second-placed player in the division. He was named the Premier League's Player of the Season. The top 1000 didn't just own him passively either — they gave him the captain's armband in 41.4% of squads, a mark of conviction rather than squad filler.
Looking ahead, Bawler's projection engine — built on last season's underlying numbers — files Fernandes in its 'rated' tier, projecting 5.1 points per gameweek from 83 minutes of expected game-time each week, close to a full match. That comes with a 16.0% chance of a big haul in any given week, reflecting his central share of Manchester United's chances and set pieces, but also a 49.7% chance of blanking — essentially a coin flip that he draws a blank on any given weekend.
What the ownership gap actually tells you is where the sharpest managers in the game pointed their squads, and that their reasoning held up by the end of the season. It doesn't tell you the same will happen again. Manchester United's attacking line-up looks different again this summer, the club's longer-term managerial picture is still unsettled, and a near-50% blank chance means Fernandes was never a low-risk pick, whatever his reputation says. Treat the gap as a reason to look closely, not as a promise of what comes next.