Start with the gap. Nico O'Reilly sat in 80.2% of the top 1000 FPL squads Bawler tracks. Across the whole game, only 19.2% of managers owned him. That's a 61-point ownership gap — one of the widest at his price last season.
This isn't an enabler story. Enablers are the sub-£4.5m defenders bought to free up funds for a premium elsewhere; nobody expects them to score. O'Reilly cost £5.3m and returned 160 points over the season. That's genuine output for a defender-priced asset, not a budget parking spot. The elite weren't hiding him to save money. They were on him because he was actually delivering.
So why didn't the rest of the game follow? The answer is in how he got his shirt in the first place. City signed Rayan Ait-Nouri for £31m last summer to be first-choice at left-back. When Ait-Nouri picked up an ankle injury early on, O'Reilly deputised — and played well enough that Pep Guardiola kept him in the side even once Ait-Nouri was fit again in late October. Josko Gvardiol's absence with injury since January entrenched him further. To a manager glancing at the price list, that's a 21-year-old sharing a position City spent well over £100m assembling — the kind of situation FPL managers are trained to treat as rotation risk and avoid. The top 1000 read team news every night rather than trusting reputation, so they saw what was actually happening on the pitch: he kept starting, and kept being backed by his manager, regardless of who was fit again.
The role itself explains the goal threat. O'Reilly is nominally a left-back but came through City's academy in attacking midfield, and Guardiola uses him that way — making underlapping runs into the penalty area rather than overlapping down the touchline. Across the season he had among the highest touches in the opposition box of any player at his position, and he scored six non-penalty Premier League goals from February onward, second in the entire league only to João Pedro's seven in that spell, plus a brace in the EFL Cup final. Nine goals in all competitions from a defender is not normal. A price list that files him as DEF, and a goal return that reads like a forward's, is exactly the kind of mismatch that shows up as a big ownership gap once one group is paying closer attention than the other.
He wasn't a pure attacking gamble, either. At 6ft 4in he wins defensive duels at a far higher rate than the man he replaced, and had spells nullifying the likes of Mohamed Salah. The pitch was: nailed minutes in a settled position, defensive competence, and a goal threat most defenders don't have. That's a different case from a nailed-on captain. Tellingly, 0% of the top 1000 captained him. He was owned as a reliable source of points, not backed as the biggest score of the week — and that lines up with what Bawler's projection engine says about him now. Heading into the new season it rates him 'rated' rather than 'premium', projects 3.82 points per gameweek from 70 minutes, an 8.2% chance of a big haul, and a 60.6% chance of blanking in any given week. Useful, not spectacular.
Here's what this does and doesn't tell you. The 61-point gap is solid evidence that the best-performing managers in the game identified a role change and a price mismatch before the rest of the FPL public did, and that it paid off — 160 points at £5.3m speaks for itself. It does not mean the same thing repeats. O'Reilly's price will likely move up now that his output is public knowledge, changing the value case entirely. City's left-back options — Ait-Nouri, Gvardiol, Nathan Aké — are all still on the books, and a settled position last season is no promise of one this season. The projection engine's own numbers, with a blank chance over 60%, suggest a squad player with a route to points rather than a week-in, week-out lock. An ownership gap like this tells you what smart, engaged managers already knew when the wider game wasn't looking closely enough. It isn't an instruction for what comes next.