At the gameweek 3 deadline, one Manchester City name split the picture down the middle. Rayan Cherki sat in 57.8% of the top 1,000 ranked squads — the elite sample Bawler tracks by reading top managers' teams every night — but only 30.5% of everyone else's. That's a 27.3-point gap between what the best-performing managers did and what the average FPL squad did, one of the widest reads in this week's data. A gap that size on a cheap squad-filler usually means an enabler, bought to free up budget rather than score. Cherki isn't that. He's a £7.8m midfielder who has already returned 22 points this season, and the reasons behind the gap are worth setting out properly.
Cherki arrived at Manchester City from Lyon last summer to do a specific job: replace the creative work Kevin De Bruyne used to do. Over his first season in England, he created 3.02 chances for teammates per 90 minutes — the second-most of any Premier League player to reach 1,000 minutes in the division. Since the start of last season he has 12 assists from open play, more than any other player in the competition across that span. That body of work earned him a place in the PFA Team of the Year. None of that is a season-long return rate for this campaign — it is last season's underlying quality, and it is the strongest single reason the top managers were prepared to buy in early.
The other side of the picture is minutes, and it's why so few of Cherki's elite owners trust him with the armband: only 1.7% of the top 1,000 gave him the captaincy in gameweek 3. Under Pep Guardiola last season, Cherki started fewer than half his Premier League appearances — 33 in total, 14 of them from the bench. New head coach Enzo Maresca hasn't settled the question either. Asked directly if Cherki would start more often, Maresca said "absolutely, yeah" — then added that it depends on "the game plan and the opponent." He's still competing with Phil Foden for the same role. That uncertainty is exactly the kind of thing that keeps casual managers away from a midfield pick.
Bawler's projection engine reflects that uncertainty rather than papering over it. Looking ahead, it currently projects Cherki for 40 minutes and 2.36 points a gameweek — modest numbers set against the 22 points he already has. It puts a 79.3% chance on him blanking in any single gameweek, and only a 5.2% chance of a big, score-swinging haul. That's the profile of an impact substitute who can turn a match in twenty minutes, not a nailed-on starter, and it lines up with how he's actually been used since he arrived in England.
Put the two pictures together and the gap explains itself. The top 1,000 are backing a full season of proven end product and accepting the rotation risk that comes with it, which is why they own him far more than they trust him with the captaincy. The wider game, much of which wants a clear starting shirt before committing a midfield slot, is still waiting for Maresca to prove Cherki plays every week. Both are defensible reads of the same player — one prioritises quality, the other certainty.
It's worth being direct about what this does and doesn't tell you. Ownership among the best-performing managers is evidence of what they currently rate, not a signal of what will happen next. A 79.3% blank chance is a real number: in any given gameweek, a quiet cameo is still more likely than a decisive one. None of this guarantees Cherki starts more often, keeps his place once Foden is fit and in form, or repeats last season's chance-creation numbers in a new system under a new manager. It tells you the managers currently doing best in FPL see enough in his output to carry that risk. Whether you do too is worth weighing against City's team news every week.