Jan Paul van Hecke sat in 71.3% of the top 1000 Fantasy Premier League squads by the end of 2025/26. Across the wider game, only 10.7% of managers had him. That's a 60.6-point gap between the best-performing squads in the world and everybody else, on a Brighton centre-back who cost just £4.7m. It is one of the widest reads of the season.
Start with what kind of pick this actually was. At that price, Van Hecke could easily have been a straightforward enabler — a defender parked in a cheap squad slot to free up money for a striker, never expected to contribute much himself. He wasn't that. He finished the season with 148 points, more than any other Brighton player, built from nine clean sheets, three goals and three assists across 36 starts in Brighton's 38 league games. That's 3,211 minutes on the pitch — as close to a guaranteed starter as a defender gets.
The extra layer, and the part the wider game seemed slow to price in, is defensive contribution points — new to FPL in 2025/26. Any defender who reaches 10 combined clearances, blocks, interceptions and tackles in a match earns two extra points, capped at that however many more he racks up. Van Hecke hit that threshold 15 times during the season — 30 points from defending alone, stacked on top of his clean sheets and attacking returns. It gave a ball-winning centre-back a scoring floor that didn't really exist before this season, even in matches Brighton failed to keep out.
That mechanism doesn't fully explain the gap on its own, since the rule applied to every defender in the league, not just him. What kept Van Hecke out of most squads was simpler: he never looked like a pick. A £4.7m Brighton centre-back with no penalties, no free-kicks and no reputation for goals doesn't catch the eye the way an attacking full-back or a defender at a bigger club does. FantasyFootballFix had his ownership at 10.9% back in the festive period; the final figure of 10.7% suggests the wider game simply never came round to him, even as the points kept landing. The best-performing managers, working from what similarly ranked squads were actually doing rather than headlines, kept faith with a nailed starter who kept delivering.
Nobody captained him. The data shows 0% of the top sample gave him the armband, which is unremarkable in itself — defenders almost never get it. But it tells you what kind of pick this was. Van Hecke wasn't backed for one big haul. He was backed as a low-maintenance source of points that freed up money elsewhere in the squad, while still doing more than most people expect from a defender at his price.
Looking ahead, Bawler's projection engine rates him at 4.16 points per gameweek with a projected 85 minutes — still effectively nailed on — and files him in its "rated" tier. The same model gives him just a 6.7% chance of a big haul in any single gameweek but a 44.6% chance of blanking, which is a fair description of the player: dependable rather than explosive, someone who adds up over a season rather than winning you a single week.
What the ownership gap shows is that the best-performing squads had done the legwork on a new scoring rule and a nailed defender before the rest of the game caught up, and it paid off across 2025/26. What it doesn't show is that the same gap opens again. Van Hecke's price has already moved to reflect last season's returns, Brighton's back line could look different, and a defender's scoring depends on a starting role that is never guaranteed a year out. The number is a record of what elite squads already knew going into the new season. It isn't a forecast.