Bart Verbruggen was one of the clearest ownership splits of the 2025/26 season. Bawler's nightly read of the top 1,000 ranked Fantasy Premier League squads found the Brighton goalkeeper in 68% of them. Across the whole game, only 9.3% of managers owned him — a 58.7-point gap between the elite sample and everyone else, one of the widest of any player at his price. None of those top managers had him as captain, which is normal for a goalkeeper; the point of owning Verbruggen was never the armband. It was the games he was quietly delivering underneath it.
At £4.6m, Verbruggen sat at the cheap end of the goalkeeper market — the kind of price usually reserved for a squad player nobody expects to see the pitch. He wasn't that. He started all 38 of Brighton's Premier League matches and played every one of the 3,420 minutes available. For a budget position, that's the first and most important box ticked: no rotation risk, no share with a back-up, just a guaranteed data point every gameweek. He finished the season with 130 points — a big total for a goalkeeper bought at the bottom of the price list, and the reason the gap between the top 1,000 and the field grew rather than closed as the season went on.
The reason most managers weren't there is straightforward: for a long stretch of matches, Brighton simply weren't keeping clean sheets. Around gameweek 12, Verbruggen had kept only one shutout in his previous 21 Premier League appearances, a run stretching back into the previous season. On the number everyone can see — the clean sheets column — he looked like a poor pick, and his price fell during this period as the wider game sold him off.
What that number didn't show was Brighton's underlying defensive record. Even through the barren run, Brighton ranked fourth in the Premier League for preventing both big chances and shots inside the box. The process behind the clean sheets was strong; only the results column was lagging. That gap — between what a defence is actually doing and what it has conceded so far — is exactly the kind of signal an ownership chart can't show but a deeper read of the numbers can, and it's a plausible reason the top 1,000 held their positions, or bought in while his price was falling, rather than following the sell-off.
The turnaround, when it came, was decisive. Verbruggen kept back-to-back clean sheets against Leeds and Crystal Palace, the second built on a string of saves that stopped what would otherwise have been a losing scoreline. He later produced a stoppage-time penalty save away at Brentford to seal a 2-1 win. By the end of the season he had 10 clean sheets — joint fifth among all Premier League goalkeepers — and had saved 106 of the 152 shots he faced, a 69.7% save rate that ranked eighth in the division.
None of this guarantees anything for next season. Brighton's goalkeeping picture is unsettled: back-up Carl Rushworth actually posted a better save percentage than Verbruggen while out on loan last season, and there is reported interest from Bayern Munich that could move Verbruggen on before a ball is kicked. Our projection engine, previewing 2026/27 on last season's evidence, currently files him in its 'rated' tier: 3.96 points per gameweek on an assumed 90 minutes, with just a 2.6% chance of a big score (what we'd call a 'haul') in any given week, and a 51.1% chance of returning nothing at all (a 'blank'). That's a normal spread for a goalkeeper — most weeks are quiet by design — but it is a projection, not a guarantee of a repeat.
What the ownership gap does show is that the best-performing managers in the game were reading Brighton's defence more carefully than the clean-sheet count alone allowed, and were prepared to sit through a bad run on the strength of it. What it doesn't show is that Verbruggen will do it again. His nailed-on status last season was itself a product of circumstance — no serious competition for the gloves, no injuries — and that isn't fixed for the season ahead. The 58.7-point gap is evidence the top of the game found something early. It isn't an instruction to follow them into it.