James Hill spent the start of this season as a squad afterthought and finished it in roughly half of the best Fantasy Premier League teams going. Bawler tracks the squads of the managers ranked in the game's top 1,000 every night and sets that against ownership across the whole game — all thirteen million squads. On that measure, Hill sat in 49.2% of the elite sample. Across the rest of the game, only 7.4% of managers owned him. That is a 41.8 percentage-point gap between how the sharpest players in FPL treated a £4.2m Bournemouth defender and how everyone else did.
Start with the price and the points, because that's what tells you what kind of player this actually is. At £4.2m, Hill is priced like a bench-warmer bought purely to free up budget for someone else — the sort of pick nobody expects to score. But his 110 points this season is far more than a budget defender is supposed to return. That combination — nailed-on cheap price, unusually high output — is the whole story here.
The reason is timing. Hill did not start the season as first choice. He began as a rotational option under Andoni Iraola, capable of playing either centre-back or right-back, and only nailed down a regular starting spot from Gameweek 19 onwards. Managers who set their defence in August had no reason to look at him. The ones who kept watching the team sheet through the winter got the version of Hill that was actually playing.
Once he was in, he stayed in — and he started delivering a type of return most fantasy managers weren't yet used to totting up. This season introduced defensive contribution points: defenders who rack up a combined ten clearances, blocks, interceptions or tackles in a match earn two extra points, on top of anything for clean sheets or goals. It rewards the unglamorous defensive work a reputation-based glance at a team sheet won't show you. Since establishing himself in the Bournemouth XI in Gameweek 19, Hill has returned those bonus points in nine of his following twelve appearances — including a 16-action performance in Gameweek 30, comfortably clearing the threshold.
That is not the whole of his season either. Hill kept six clean sheets in 29 Premier League appearances and chipped in three assists, mostly from set-piece situations. None of those numbers scream premium defender. Put together with a defensive-actions habit that hits the bonus threshold most weeks, they add up to a player who was quietly one of the more efficient sources of points at his price in the whole game.
None of the elite sample captained him — 0% of the top 1,000 squads gave Hill the armband at any point. That detail matters as much as the ownership number. This was never a differential picked for a big haul. It was a floor pick: a cheap defender who kept turning up for appearance points, defensive contribution points and the odd clean sheet, freeing up budget for the premiums the same managers were captaining elsewhere. The wider game, working from reputation and pre-season price tags rather than in-season defensive actions, mostly missed him until the ownership numbers were already this far apart.
What does Bawler's projection engine make of him going into next season? Its early preview — built on last season's underlying data, since the new campaign hasn't kicked off — has Hill projected for 2.58 points per gameweek from 55 minutes on average. Fifty-five minutes is short of the 60-minute mark that guarantees full appearance points and gives a defender the game time to rack up defensive actions in the first place, which tells you the model isn't yet convinced he starts every week the way he did from Gameweek 19 onward. The engine files him in its 'rated' tier, gives him a 2.5% chance of a big haul in any given gameweek, and a 60.1% chance of blanking. Put plainly: this is a projection for a low-ceiling, inconsistent contributor, not a repeat of the run that got him into half of the best squads in the game.
So what should a reader take from all this? That the best-performing managers in FPL spotted a genuine role change and a new scoring mechanic working in Hill's favour well before the rest of the game caught up, and it paid off in points at a bargain price. That is worth knowing. It is not a guarantee that the same thing repeats. His own price-setters clearly still see meaningful uncertainty over his midfield-facing minutes next season, and a defender who blanks three times out of five on the projection engine's own numbers is not a pick to make on reputation alone. The ownership gap tells you where the smart money looked. What happens with his shirt this time is still to be decided on the training ground, not in last season's numbers.