Erling Haaland sits in 98.6% of the top 1000 FPL squads Bawler tracks every night - close to total consensus among the best-ranked managers in the game. In gameweek 3 alone, 95.8% of those same squads gave him the captain's armband, one of the most one-sided calls in fantasy football this season. Ownership across the whole game, all thirteen million managers, was 71.1%. That is a 27.5-point gap between the elite and everyone else on a single player, and it is happening on the most expensive player fantasy football has ever priced.
Haaland starts 2026/27 at £15.5m, a Premier League fantasy record and £1.5m above his price a year ago. Committing that much to one man leaves just £84.5m for the other fourteen players in a squad - a real structural decision, not a minor one. That price alone is a plausible reason a chunk of the wider game held back. Spend a sixth of the budget on a forward and the rest of the team has to be built with real discipline.
There is a second reason regular managers may have hesitated. This is Manchester City's first season since 2015/16 without Pep Guardiola, who left in the summer, with Enzo Maresca now in charge. City have also lost Rodri, Bernardo Silva and John Stones since the end of last season. A new manager, a reshaped midfield, an unfamiliar shape - for anyone assessing a City forward, that is legitimate uncertainty to sit with at the start of a season, and enough to make some managers wait rather than commit a record fee straight away.
The elite did not wait. They were reading data that said Haaland's individual job had not changed. He blanked in the opening game, then responded with a brace at Crystal Palace in gameweek 2 worth 13 points. Heading into gameweek 3, no forward in the division had attempted more shots (10) or more shots inside the box (9) than Haaland, and he was also joint-top for clear goalscoring chances (3). Whatever else was different about City under a new manager, the ball was still finding him in the positions that matter.
That is the mechanism behind the 27.5-point gap. It is not that the wider game ignored Haaland - almost three-quarters of all managers owned him too. It is that the sharpest managers treated the price tag and the managerial change as noise rather than a reason to hesitate, while a meaningful slice of the field treated them as reasons to wait. The captaincy number shows how far that conviction went: 95.8% of the top 1000 pointed the armband at him in that single gameweek, the kind of near-unanimous call that only happens when a player's underlying numbers and his standing among elite peers are pointing the same way at once.
It is worth being honest about what that does and does not prove. Being owned and captained by almost every elite manager in one gameweek is evidence that the sharpest people in the game were confident - it is not proof he was about to haul. Bawler's own projection model classes Haaland's gameweek 3 outlook as "rated" rather than anything higher, projecting 5.17 points from an expected 86 minutes on the pitch. Within that single gameweek, the model gives just a 14.2% chance of what it defines as a haul and a 68% chance of a blank. Even a fully-owned, fully-captained, record-priced striker carries real risk in any individual week, and his 24 points so far this season have come from just two matches played - too small a sample to say his numbers against Manchester City's toughest upcoming tests, rather than a struggling Coventry, will look the same.
None of this guarantees Haaland keeps producing under a new manager across a full season, and the ownership and captaincy split only tells us what the best-ranked managers believed at one moment, not what happens next. But for any manager still weighing up whether to find that extra budget, it is a useful signal: the people whose squads sit at the top of the game, who are tracked here every night, were not hedging on Haaland - even at a record price, even with City rebuilding around a new manager.