Bart Verbruggen started Gameweek 2 in 66.8% of the top 991 Fantasy Premier League squads on Bawler's elite sample - the ranked managers at the very top of the overall standings. Across the whole game, only 21.6% of managers owned him. That's a 45.2-point ownership gap, one of the widest of any goalkeeper this season, and it needs explaining before anyone reads too much into it.
Start with the basics. Verbruggen costs £4.5m and has 6 points to his name through two gameweeks. Not one of the top 991 gave him the captaincy in Gameweek 2. A cheap goalkeeper that nobody arms and few expect to haul is not a differential the elite are hoping explodes - it's a budget pick, chosen to cost as little of the squad as possible while the money goes on forwards and midfielders instead.
The case for him was built before a ball was kicked. Verbruggen was widely tipped as the best-value £4.5m goalkeeper heading into the season, on the back of a 74.6% save rate last season - second-best among regularly used Premier League goalkeepers - as Brighton conceded just 46 goals, the third-fewest in the division, and allowed only 142 shots on target, the fourth-fewest. That is the kind of underlying defensive record that gets a cheap goalkeeper onto spreadsheets long before the wider game notices him.
Gameweek 1 did nothing to change the plan. Brighton beat Aston Villa 4-0 at home, and Villa never had a shot on target - Verbruggen picked up a clean sheet without making a save. For a sample assembling squads around value, that is about as low-risk as a goalkeeper pick gets.
Gameweek 2 was less kind. Brighton lost 4-3 away at Chelsea, a game that got away from them early - Romeo Lavia scored inside four minutes after pouncing on a mix-up between Verbruggen and Wieffer. Brighton fought back to 4-2 before a late Chelsea reply settled it, but there was no clean sheet, and Verbruggen was directly involved in the goal that put Chelsea ahead. It is a reminder that even a well-reasoned enabler pick has bad afternoons.
Bawler's projection engine has adjusted accordingly. It now rates Verbruggen for 3.28 points a gameweek, with a 58.3% chance of a blank - the engine's term for a game returning zero or next to nothing - and only a 1.7% chance of a haul, a big scoring game built on a clean sheet and save points. That is the profile of a nailed cheap keeper, not a genuine differential. He is projected for 83 minutes a game, essentially confirming his starting spot; the engine simply is not promising much more than that.
So why did not the rest of the game follow? Partly timing - the case for Verbruggen was built on last season's shot-stopping numbers and Brighton's defensive form, the kind of detail that filters through 991 elite squads faster than it reaches 13 million casual ones. Partly habit - goalkeeper is the position where most managers default to a big-club name or do not think hard about value at all, because one keeper rarely decides a season. The elite sample, picking every squad slot to maximise points per pound, do not have that luxury: a cheap, nailed goalkeeper is free budget for a striker.
None of this means Verbruggen is about to become a scoring goalkeeper. Zero captaincy in the top sample and the engine's own numbers say the same thing: this is a value pick, not a hidden gem, and Chelsea away showed exactly how a game can go wrong for any goalkeeper regardless of the underlying numbers behind him. What the ownership gap does show is that the best managers had done the pricing and defensive-record homework before Gameweek 1, while most of the game caught up later or not at all. That is worth knowing. It is not a reason to expect Verbruggen to start hauling.