Bawler reads the squads of the top 1000 managers in the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings every night and compares what they own against the whole 13 million-plus game. On Bukayo Saka this season, that comparison threw up one of the widest gaps in the data: 38.2% of those elite squads owned him, against just 11.6% of everyone else. That is a 26.6-point ownership gap.
At £10.0m, Saka was never a cheap squad-filler bought to free up funds elsewhere. He finished the season on 157 points. So this is not an enabler story. It is about the shrewdest managers in the game holding their nerve on a mid-price player that most of the field gave up on.
The reason most managers stayed away is straightforward: Saka's season kept getting interrupted. He had a hamstring problem that ruled him out from 23 August to 17 September, a hip injury from 30 January to 11 February, and an Achilles tendon strain that sidelined him from 23 March to 20 April. Put together, he has missed more than 30 games for club and country since the start of 2025.
Every one of those spells triggers the same reflex across a game of 13 million squads: move him on before a big price tag sits on the bench for another week. For a manager with one team and a handful of free transfers, that is a sensible, low-risk call. It is just not the call the managers at the top of the overall standings kept making.
What they appear to have weighed up instead was what Arsenal look like with Saka in the side against life without him. Across the matches he was fit enough to play this season, Arsenal won 23, drew 7 and lost 2 from 36 games, scoring 73 goals and averaging 2.3 points per game. In the 10 games he missed, Arsenal won 6, drew 1 and lost 3, scoring 18 goals at 1.5 points per game. Saka does not just produce goals and assists himself. His presence changes the shape of the whole Arsenal forward line, which is a reason to keep him even through a run on the sidelines.
On the individual numbers, Saka scored 7 goals and set up 10 more in 2,218 minutes, adding 18 bonus points along the way. That is a strong return for a player who lost a large chunk of the campaign to fitness problems.
The captaincy figures add detail to the picture. Only 0.8% of the top 1000 squads gave Saka the armband. The elite were not piling everything onto him. They wanted him in their squads for the goal threat and creativity when fit, without adding the extra risk of doubling his points in a week he might be managed carefully or withdrawn early.
So what does a 26.6-point ownership gap actually prove? It shows that the managers at the top of the overall standings read Saka's fitness news with more nuance than the reflex sell-off that swept through the wider game after each setback. It does not prove he will repeat that pattern next season.
Bawler's projection engine, previewing the campaign ahead on the back of this season, places him in its "rated" tier rather than its top bracket. It forecasts 3.53 points per gameweek on average, built on a projected 59 minutes per gameweek - well short of a full match, and a direct reflection of the fitness record above. In any given gameweek, it gives him a 9.4% chance of a big haul against a 58.1% chance of blanking completely.
That combination of real goal threat and real fitness doubt is exactly what the top managers were weighing up all season. The ownership gap tells you where the shrewdest room in the game placed its trust last season. It is evidence worth looking at, not a guarantee they will be right again.