By the gameweek 3 deadline, 93.4% of Fantasy Premier League's top 1000 managers had Alexander Isak in their squad. Just 16.5% of all managers in the game did the same. That's a 76.9 percentage-point gap between how the best-ranked managers in the game were set up and how almost everyone else was - one of the widest ownership splits on any player this season, and it belongs to a £9.0m forward who had barely convinced anyone at Liverpool twelve months earlier.
This isn't a cut-price bench option quietly picked up to fund a big name elsewhere. At £9.0m, Isak sits at the upper end of the forward price bracket, and his 23 points through three gameweeks show he's being backed to start and score, not to make up the numbers. A gap this size on a player at this price means the elite identified something before it showed up in reputation or ownership - not that they found a clever way to save money.
The scepticism from the wider game is easy to understand. Isak's move to Liverpool in September 2025 was a British transfer record, but it arrived at the end of a drawn-out saga that cost him a full pre-season. He then suffered an ankle injury that kept him out for months, and by the time his debut campaign ended he had missed 28 games and scored just four goals - a miserable return for a forward priced as a first-choice starter. That history is exactly why most managers treated this season cautiously. A record fee followed by one bad, injury-hit year is a hard combination to trust again with real squad budget.
The top managers were working from a different picture. Isak arrived at pre-season saying he felt "100% fit" for the first time since his move, played 358 minutes for Sweden at the World Cup without a setback, and looked sharp in Liverpool's friendlies, scoring against Monaco. More significantly, his direct rival for the striker's shirt, Hugo Ekitike, ruptured his Achilles and is expected to miss the first half of the season at minimum. That injury did more to secure Isak's starting spot than any run of form could have - new manager Andoni Iraola has reportedly built specific tactical instructions around him as the No. 9. The elite ownership figure reflects a change in Isak's role and competition, not just optimism that he'd finally stay fit.
Isak has backed that reasoning up early on. He scored in each of Liverpool's first two league games, 2-2 draws away at his old club Newcastle and at home to Nottingham Forest, then scored twice inside the first nine minutes of a 0-2 win at Ipswich in gameweek 3, both goals set up by Cody Gakpo. Almost a quarter of the top 1000 - 24.5% - gave Isak the captain's armband in that gameweek alone, and the Ipswich brace will have repaid plenty of them.
None of this means the projection engine treats Isak as a safe pick. Looking ahead, it has him down for 5.03 points per gameweek on a projected 75 minutes - short of a guaranteed start to finish, in keeping with a player whose game time has been managed carefully since his return. The model tags him as a "thin" projection: a 14.3% chance of a big haul in any given gameweek, against a 68.8% chance of blanking. That's a genuinely boom-or-bust profile even now - the value is concentrated in weeks like the Ipswich game, and blanks will outnumber returns along the way.
What the numbers actually show is that the best-ranked managers in the game moved on a structural change - Ekitike's injury and Isak's return to full fitness - before the price or the wider ownership figures caught up with it. They don't show that Isak is now a guaranteed source of points, or that the 93.4% figure will hold once Ekitike is fit again and competing for the same shirt. The projection engine's own numbers, with blanks nearly five times as likely as hauls, are a reminder that this remains a high-variance pick even for those who got there early. The ownership gap is evidence worth weighing, not an instruction to follow.