Iliman Ndiaye sat in 42.3% of the top 991 Fantasy Premier League squads heading into Gameweek 2 this season. Across the wider game, only 14.2% of managers owned him — a 28.1-point gap between the best squads and everyone else. At £6.0m, he is not a nothing pick the top of the table were parking money on. He is a proper differentiator, and the numbers around him explain why the elite moved first.
Price and returns matter here. £6.0m is mid-table for a midfielder, not the bottom-of-the-list territory reserved for enablers bought purely to free up budget elsewhere. Ndiaye had already delivered: 13 points from Everton's first two matches of the season, built on a genuine goal contribution rather than clean sheets or bonus scraps. This is a player doing something on the pitch, not a squad-filler picked to sit quietly on the bench.
The mechanism starts with role. Ndiaye scored nine league goals last season playing off the left for David Moyes, and the pre-season signals pointed to more of the same. He reclaimed Everton's penalty-taking duties in August after a brief scare when a team-mate took one in his place, and he combined well in friendlies alongside new signing Jack Grealish. Managers who track minutes, position and set-piece duty closely had reason to expect Ndiaye to start, and to be involved whenever Everton attacked.
That case played out fast. Ndiaye set up Thierno Barry's header in Everton's Gameweek 1 win over Crystal Palace, then scored the first-ever Premier League goal at the club's new Hill Dickinson Stadium in Gameweek 2, turning in a Grealish cross against Brighton. Two matches, a goal and an assist, at a £6.0m price point much of the game had filed under "squad player." The top managers were already positioned for it.
What they were not doing is captaining him. In this same Gameweek 2 snapshot, 0% of the top sample gave Ndiaye the armband, despite 42.3% owning him. The read is a supporting one: back the goal threat as a differentiator in the squad, but keep the captaincy on a more established source of points. A high ownership figure sitting next to a zero captaincy figure describes conviction in his role, not in Ndiaye as the focal point of the team.
The projection engine, which looks forward rather than back, is more measured. It has Ndiaye down for 3.99 projected points per gameweek from here, with 76 projected minutes — close to a full game — and files him under "rated" rather than the tiers above it. The chance of a big haul in any given gameweek sits at 8.6%, and the chance of blanking is 52.4%. Read together: a nailed starter who contributes, but not one the model expects to explode regularly.
There is a complication the Gameweek 2 numbers can't show, because it broke after that snapshot was taken. On transfer deadline day, 1 September, Manchester City agreed a fee reported at £65m for Ndiaye, an alternative move after a bid for Liverpool's Cody Gakpo was turned down. The deal was described as agreed rather than completed at the time of writing. If it goes through, the case that built this ownership gap — nailed minutes, penalties, Grealish's service — resets completely. A move to a squad with far more attacking competition would not obviously improve his game time or his price efficiency.
So take the 28.1-point gap for what it is: evidence that the best Fantasy Premier League managers read Ndiaye's role and Everton's pre-season signals correctly, and were rewarded with a goal and an assist inside two matches for a £6.0m outlay. It does not tell you what happens next. His club situation changed within days of this data being taken, and the projection engine's own read on him going forward is "rated," not exceptional. Ownership gaps like this are worth investigating — this one just happened to be investigated at the exact moment the ground shifted under it.