Gameweek 3 of the 2026/27 season closed with a striking split. Maxim De Cuyper, Brighton's £4.7m defender, sat in 68.1% of the top 1,000 overall-rank squads in the game — the managers occupying the very summit of the standings. Across the rest of the game's squads, only 17.3% owned him. That's a 50.8-point gap between the two groups, and it's one of the widest ownership splits we've measured this season.
Normally a gap that size at that price points to one thing: an enabler. A £4.5-5m player nobody expects to score, bought purely to free up budget for the premiums further forward. De Cuyper doesn't fit that mould cleanly. He has 17 points on the board after three gameweeks — modest in isolation, but almost all of it landed in a single match, and he's been credited with creating more big scoring chances than any other defender in the division this season, despite playing well under half the available minutes. That's not enabler behaviour. Something else is going on.
The explanation sits in Brighton's team sheet, not in De Cuyper's quality as a full-back. Ferdi Kadioglu owns the left-back shirt under manager Fabian Hurzeler — he started every Brighton match there from Gameweek 5 of last season onward and shows no sign of losing it. That left De Cuyper, signed as cover, without a natural route into the side in his own position.
Then Brighton's wide options thinned out. Yankuba Minteh went down with a leg injury expected to keep him out for two to three months, with further attacking absences alongside him. Hurzeler's response was to push De Cuyper forward, first in a preseason friendly against Bologna and then in the league itself, using him as an auxiliary left winger rather than a conventional left-back.
Because his FPL position stayed set to defender, that switch mattered enormously. De Cuyper kept access to clean-sheet points while taking on a winger's shot and chance-creation numbers — four shots and three created chances on his full debut, an 18th-minute goal, and a display worth 17 points against a porous Aston Villa back line. It is a rare and valuable combination: a defender's price tag carrying a winger's attacking numbers.
That is precisely the kind of detail elite squads are built to catch, and the wider game often isn't. Spotting it means reading Brighton's preseason team news closely enough to know Minteh was out, that Kadioglu wasn't moving, and that Hurzeler intended to keep using De Cuyper wide rather than as back-up at left-back. Most of the ownership base works from broader signals — price bracket, reputation, headline returns — and De Cuyper's 'out of position' tag reads more like a rotation-risk warning than an attacking opportunity to a manager scanning quickly. A blank away at Chelsea straight after his big return will have reinforced that caution for anyone watching the pattern rather than the preseason detail.
What the elite did with him is also telling. Despite that 68.1% ownership, just 0.1% of top-1000 managers gave him the captain's armband in Gameweek 3 — essentially nobody. So this was not a case of the best managers backing De Cuyper as a match-winner. It reads more like a calculated squad decision: a defender who could plausibly add goal threat on top of clean-sheet cover, banked cheaply enough to help fund a premium elsewhere, rather than a differential picked to win a gameweek outright.
Bawler's projection engine is cautious about what comes next. It rates De Cuyper for 2.54 points in the coming gameweek, with projected minutes of just 51 — barely more than half a match — and puts his chance of a big score at 5.9% against a 72% chance of blanking entirely. Brighton have since signed Hadjam, another option who can play on that side, and Minteh's eventual return remains on the horizon. Both weigh on how secure De Cuyper's wide role really is from here.
None of that undoes what already happened. The ownership gap shows the top of the table read Brighton's injury list and team news more precisely than most of the game managed to, and it paid off with one big return inside the first three gameweeks. It doesn't mean the role holds. The projection engine's own numbers — a far bigger chance of nothing than of another haul — say the sensible response is to watch how Brighton set up next, not to assume the pattern repeats.