At the Gameweek 2 deadline, Maxim De Cuyper sat in 38.4% of the top 991 Fantasy Premier League squads — the elite bracket bawler.ai tracks every night. Across the whole game, only 14% of managers owned him. That's a 24.4-point gap, one of the widest of the season so far, on a Brighton player the game prices as a £4.7m defender.
De Cuyper joined Brighton from Club Brugge in the summer, for a fee reported around £17m, and signed a five-year deal until 2030. Head coach Fabian Hürzeler called him 'a creative left-back with great experience at Champions League level,' and the plan was for him to compete with Ferdi Kadioglu for the left-back shirt. Fantasy priced him accordingly: cheap, defensive, no Premier League track record.
Two separate problems changed that plan inside a week. Brighton's first-choice wingers, Kaoru Mitoma and Yankuba Minteh, were both missing for the opener — Mitoma still working back from a hamstring injury he'd carried since May, Minteh ruled out for two to three months with a leg problem. Then Kadioglu himself picked up a minor injury before kick-off against Aston Villa, with Lewis Dunk coming into central defence and Olivier Boscagli shifted out to left-back. That left De Cuyper — a defender by trade and by FPL pricing — deployed high and wide on the left wing, doing a forward's job rather than his own.
He took the chance. Four shots, three chances created, a goal, an assist and a clean sheet added up to 17 points in a 4-0 win over 10-man Villa — still his entire season total at the Gameweek 2 read. Brighton's own website called it 'massive returns' from a player registered as a defender. The market reacted fast: De Cuyper was one of only two players in the whole game to see his price rise immediately after Gameweek 1.
That's the mechanism behind the ownership gap. De Cuyper is still scored as a defender, so he keeps access to a clean sheet bonus and to the two points any defender can earn from ten combined tackles, interceptions, blocks and clearances in a match — a defensive-contribution rule brought into the game in recent seasons. On top of that, while Mitoma and Minteh are out, he is being asked to create chances and take shots like a winger. A player who can score both ways, priced at the bottom of the defender bracket, is exactly the kind of gap the best-ranked managers are built to find first — whether that meant reading the two Brighton absences before the opener or moving on the haul before Gameweek 2, while the rest of the game, still just 14% owned, hadn't caught up.
Even the managers who bought him were cautious. Not one of the top 991 gave De Cuyper the captaincy that gameweek — 0% of the armband went his way. Kadioglu remains Brighton's first-choice left-back when fit, and there's been transfer speculation linking him with a move away, which adds more uncertainty rather than less to who plays where. The projection engine reflects that: it rates De Cuyper for 4.35 points per gameweek from here, projects 71 minutes rather than a full 90, and places him in its 'rated' tier rather than the top bracket. It gives him an 11.4% chance of a big haul in a given gameweek against a 53.1% chance of blanking.
None of that says Gameweek 1 repeats. Villa had a man sent off and were beaten 4-0, which flattered the whole Brighton side, not just De Cuyper, and a defender asked to do a winger's job usually loses it the moment the specialists return fit. What the ownership gap actually shows is that the top of the table reached for a specific, explainable situation — a cheap defender doing an injured winger's job, still eligible for defensive points too — before most of the game had worked it out. Whether that situation lasts the season is a question for the fixtures still to come, not one this data can settle in advance.