Cody Gakpo was in 42.6% of the top 1,000 Fantasy Premier League squads after gameweek 3. Across the roughly 13 million other squads in the game, he was owned by just 9% of managers. That is a 33.6-point gap between how the best-performing managers in the game were set up and how almost everyone else was — one of the widest ownership splits of the season so far.
At £7.1m, Gakpo is not a cut-price enabler bought to free up funds for premiums elsewhere. He sits in the mid-price band, and his 28 points through three gameweeks back that up. When a mid-price player carries a gap this size, it usually means the sharpest managers spotted something specific — a role, a fixture run, or a change in circumstance — before it filtered through to the wider game. That is what happened here.
The story starts with a move that never happened. Liverpool had agreed to sell Gakpo to Manchester City for a reported £80m before deadline day, only to pull out when they could not land a replacement winger in time — both Brighton's Yankuba Minteh and Crystal Palace's Ismaila Sarr were targeted and neither arrived. Gakpo, reportedly ready to go, stayed at Anfield instead.
New head coach Andoni Iraola made his priorities clear once the deal collapsed, publicly backing Gakpo as "one of our best players" rather than treating him as makeweight to be moved on in January. The early signs back that up. Against Ipswich Town on 4 September, Gakpo set up both goals in Liverpool's first win of the season, including a first-time ball for new signing Alexander Isak from the outside of his boot. Iraola has talked about his wingers needing to adapt to a more direct, high-intensity way of creating chances, and Gakpo has looked the most comfortable of anyone doing it.
That is the part the ownership figures alone cannot show but the context explains. Gakpo's underlying story this season is a club trying to sell him, failing to find cover, and turning him into a first-choice creator inside three weeks. Most of the 13 million managers in the game either set their squads before that story had fully played out, or did not track it closely enough to reprice him once it had. Managers running the most successful squads tend to watch pre-season form and transfer sagas closely, and to react fastest when a saga resolves in a player's favour rather than filing it as a reason to avoid him.
It is also worth being precise about what the elite ownership does and does not show. Only 1.2% of the top 1,000 gave Gakpo the captain's armband in gameweek 3, despite well over four in ten of them owning him. That is a specific, single-gameweek reading, not a season-long rate — but it tells you how he is being used at the top of the game: as a squad piece adding goal threat and service, not as anyone's first-choice armband. The captaincy is staying with the established premiums even where Gakpo is in the squad.
The projection engine's view of what comes next is more measured than the ownership gap alone might suggest. It has Gakpo down for 4.48 points a gameweek from here, with projected minutes of 72 — enough for a likely start, but short of a nailed-on 90, reflecting real competition for places in Liverpool's forward line from Isak, Bradley Barcola and others. The split between his best and worst weeks is wide: an 11.1% chance of one of the big gameweeks that can swing a season, against a 50.6% chance of blanking altogether. Roughly half his gameweeks, on this projection, are expected to return nothing.
None of this is a guarantee of what Gakpo does next. A 33.6-point ownership gap is evidence that the best managers in the game rated him more highly than the rest of the field at one specific moment, reacting to a real change in his circumstances at Liverpool. It is not proof that the change keeps paying off, and the projection engine's own numbers — a blank still rated more likely than a haul in any given week — say as much. With Isak and Barcola both competing for the same forward line, Gakpo's case rests on a role holding up, not on a guaranteed run of returns.