Gabriel started the 2025/26 season in 94.5% of the top 1000 Fantasy Premier League squads that bawler.ai tracks every night. Across the game as a whole, only 45.4% of managers owned him. That is a 49.1-point ownership gap — one of the widest for any defender all season — for a player who finished with 209 points, more than almost anyone in the game. Here is what the best managers saw that the rest of the field only priced in gradually.
First, what sort of pick this is. At £7.3m, Gabriel is not a cheap enabler bought to release funds for a forward line — he is one of the pricier defenders in the game, picked to score points himself, not just to make room for someone else's. According to the Premier League's own end-of-season Fantasy review, he averaged 6.9 points per match this season, more than any other player, and banked a career-high eight attacking returns and 30 bonus points along the way. He finished just four points shy of Andy Robertson's all-time points record for a Fantasy defender, despite not starting eight of Arsenal's thirty-eight league games. This is a premium asset the elite backed almost unanimously. The question is why the rest of the game did not follow at the same pace.
The foundation is Arsenal's defence. The club kept 19 Premier League clean sheets in 2025/26, their best return in a single top-flight campaign since 1998/99, on the way to the title. Clean sheets are the bedrock of any defender's Fantasy season — four points each, before anything else is added — and Gabriel, alongside William Saliba, was first choice in the pairing that delivered them. A defence that good, in front of a goalkeeper as reliable as David Raya, was always going to make its centre-backs an obvious source of defensive points. That much, most of the game could see.
The part fewer managers priced in quickly was new. FPL introduced defensive contribution points for the first time in 2025/26: a defender earns two points in any match where they rack up ten combined clearances, blocks, interceptions and tackles, capped at two points regardless of how many more they make. It is a rule with no season of history behind it, built to reward exactly the kind of aggressive, high-volume defending Gabriel does. Fantasy Football Fix has him banking 22 defensive-contribution points across the campaign — a meaningful add-on to his clean sheets, and the sort of thing that shows up in the underlying numbers before it shows up in reputation. Add three goals and four assists from his threat at set pieces, and the points were coming from three separate sources, not one.
Why didn't the whole game join in? Price is part of it. Gabriel started the season at £6.0m and rose to £7.3m as he delivered, so managers who missed the early window paid progressively more to get in. Injury is the other part: he missed the best part of a month in November 2025, sitting out the North London derby and other major fixtures, and finished the season having started 30 of a possible 38 league games. That is real absence, not caution for its own sake.
One number is worth sitting with. Not a single one of the top 1000 ever gave Gabriel the captain's armband. His appeal was never about a huge single-week score. It was about a floor — a defender expected to deliver most weeks, in a squad built to survive the weeks he did not.
None of that tells you what happens next season. Bawler's projection engine, previewing 2026/27 on this season's underlying data, now has Gabriel down for 4.3 points a gameweek from an expected 72 minutes of game time — its "rated" tier, not the top bracket — with a 10.0% chance of a big haul in any given gameweek and a 49.4% chance of blanking. That is a materially more cautious picture than a 209-point season suggests, and it reflects a player who has already missed time to injury this season and who will not be available at anything like last year's price. The ownership gap tells you what the best managers judged correctly for a season that has already been played. It is not a guarantee they will be right again.