Cole Palmer sat in 43.5% of the top 991 Fantasy Premier League squads at the Gameweek 2 deadline this season. Across the game as a whole, only 18.2% of managers owned him — a 25.3 percentage-point gap between what the best managers were doing and what everyone else was doing. At £9.6m, with 20 points on the board already, this isn't a case of the elite finding a cheap squad-filler to free up funds elsewhere. Palmer is a premium midfielder. The gap says the best managers were prepared to spend big on him while the rest of the game was not, and the reason comes down to fitness and a change of manager, not a hidden stat.
The caution is easy to explain. Palmer's 2025/26 season was wrecked by a groin injury that struck in August and kept him out for around three months. Even when he returned, he never really found his best form again — a run as barren as one goal in eight games — and it cost him a place in England's World Cup squad. For most FPL managers building a squad this season, that's a recent memory of a player who cost a fortune and delivered little. Treating him as a risk rather than a certainty was a reasonable, defensible read of the evidence.
The top managers were working from different evidence. Palmer's World Cup omission meant he had his first properly extended summer off since 2022, arriving for pre-season fresh rather than patched together. More significant is the change of manager. Under Xabi Alonso, Palmer has been given licence he says he didn't have before. Alonso deployed him as one of two attacking midfielders behind the striker, in a system built to let him roam. Palmer described the shift bluntly: "Last season, I wouldn't have even made that run because it's not a safe zone." Alonso's instruction was the opposite — move into that zone, drop into play, get on the ball, create. That is a specific, named tactical change, not a vague hope that a good player finds form again.
The evidence arrived immediately. Palmer scored and assisted in Alonso's first game in charge, a 3-2 win at Fulham, while only 14% of all managers owned him at the time — a genuine differential pick. By the following week's deadline, the top 991 managers had moved decisively, taking their ownership of him to 43.5%. The rest of the game had barely reacted, edging up to just 18.2%. The gap is really a story about reaction speed: the elite read the role change and the fitness update and acted on it within a gameweek, while most of the game was still waiting for a second data point.
One number complicates the story of straightforward conviction. In Gameweek 2 itself, only 0.1% of the elite gave Palmer the captain's armband — a figure for that single gameweek, not a season-long rate. Owning a player and trusting him with the armband are different decisions. The best managers wanted Palmer in their squad for the role change and the fitness story; they were not yet ready to make him their single biggest source of points for the week. That is a meaningful distinction: conviction, with a degree of caution still attached.
Bawler's own projection engine, which looks forward rather than back, is similarly measured. It projects Palmer for 3.66 points per gameweek and 79 minutes — enough to mark him as a near-certain starter under Alonso — and places him in its "rated" tier rather than its top bracket. The model gives him only a 7.7% chance of a big haul in a given gameweek, against a 61.0% chance of blanking. Even the engine that trusts his minutes is not projecting fireworks every week.
None of this is a guarantee of anything. The ownership gap and the Gameweek 1 return show that the best managers read Palmer's fitness recovery and his new role correctly, and moved before the rest of the game did — that much is real and worth noting. It does not show that he repeats it. His own injury history is recent, Chelsea's fixtures will vary, and the projection model's 61.0% blank chance is a reminder that most gameweeks, for most players, do not produce a return. Treat the gap as evidence that the best managers did their homework on a role change — not as an instruction to follow it blindly.