Pascal Groß's Gameweek 38 numbers are the widest ownership split Bawler recorded all season. By the season's final round, the 5.6m Brighton midfielder sat in 48.1% of the squads belonging to Bawler's top 1000 sample — the best-performing managers in the game, whose squads we read every night. Across the rest of Fantasy Premier League's near-thirteen million managers, he was owned by just 3%. That's a 45.1 percentage-point gap between the elite and everyone else. He finished the season with 78 points, and in that same Gameweek 38 snapshot only 0.1% of the top sample had given him the captain's armband. So the elite wanted him in the squad, not leading the line. The reason starts in January.
Groß was Brighton's first-ever Premier League signing, arriving in 2017, and became one of the club's most reliable creative players before leaving for Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2024. Then, a little under 24 hours before the Gameweek 20 deadline, he made a surprise return to the Amex in January — 18 months and 66 Dortmund appearances after he left, with 17 assists to show for his time in Germany. At 34, he came back into a young Brighton squad, with head coach Fabian Hürzeler saying he could "define the rhythm of the game, create chances and finish in attack."
None of that history was priced into the game. Groß had been out of the Premier League for a year and a half, so he was set at 5.6m — cheap for a player who, in his previous spell at Brighton, had set a club Premier League record with 10 assists in a single season and produced 12 goals and 22 assists across 85 matches under former head coach Roberto De Zerbi. A domestic-window move for a 34-year-old returning from the Bundesliga, completed a day before a deadline, is exactly the sort of transfer a lot of squads miss or write off on age alone. Managers who track transfer business and role changes closely evidently didn't write it off. That's the first part of the mechanism — attention and trust in a known role, not a hidden statistic nobody else could see.
The second part is that the trust was repaid. From Gameweek 22 onwards, Groß recorded the most crosses of any player in the Premier League, the joint-second-most corners taken and the third-most chances created, all built on the same crossing and set-piece role that had defined his first Brighton spell. Between Gameweeks 28 and 36 he added six assists in nine matches. Brighton's own analytics team called it proof he wasn't just a sentimental signing. A purple patch like that, arriving after the elite had already bought in, is more likely to have hardened the ownership gap than opened it — the top sample kept faith while the wider game was slower to react.
That still leaves the captaincy question. Bawler's projection engine, previewing his role forward from this season's data, projects Groß for 3.73 points per gameweek on 86 projected minutes — enough to carry a "rated" tier as a nailed starter, but with only a 7.4% chance of a big scoring haul in any given week against a 53.3% chance of blanking, meaning no points at all. That's a low-ceiling, high-floor profile: useful most weeks, rarely explosive. It fits a player valued for cheap, dependable set-piece and crossing output — the reason the elite were happy to own him and almost nobody gave him the armband.
What the 45.1-point gap actually shows is that the managers at the top of the game reacted faster to a specific piece of transfer news, and trusted a role they already understood, more than the rest of the field did — and that the underlying numbers back up why. It is evidence worth taking seriously, not proof of what comes next. Groß will be 35 before next season kicks off, Brighton's midfield and set-piece responsibilities could shift again in pre-season, and a projection built on half a campaign carries more uncertainty than one built on a full year. The gap shows where the sharpest attention in the game was pointed. It doesn't guarantee where the points go from here.