At the Gameweek 3 deadline, Rayan Cherki sat in 53.5% of the squads belonging to the top 992 managers in the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings. Across the roughly 13 million squads in the game as a whole, he was owned by just 30.5%. That's a 23-point gap between the sharpest end of the game and everyone else, on the same player, at the same price, at the same moment.
That gap matters more because of who Cherki is. At £7.8m, he isn't a cheap squad-filler bought to free up budget for bigger names elsewhere — he sits in solid mid-price territory. He started the 2026/27 season at £6.5m and had already risen twice by the Gameweek 3 deadline, on the back of 25 points from Manchester City's first three fixtures. This looks like a differentiator the best managers found early, not an enabler bought to do nothing.
Cherki joined City from Lyon in 2025. The season before his move, he managed 32 goal involvements in 44 appearances in France. He's now into his second season in Manchester — usually the point at which an import's role at a Guardiola side starts to properly bed in.
The mechanism behind the ownership gap looks like role, not hope. Cherki has become City's right-sided No. 10 in Guardiola's system, the advanced, goal-adjacent role the club has missed since Kevin De Bruyne left. Guardiola has said publicly that he wants Cherki 'in the final third' as often as possible.
There's evidence that positioning works. Last season, once Guardiola settled on pairing Cherki with Phil Foden, City scored at a rate of one goal every 30.16 minutes across the five league games the pair started together — well up on the club's overall rate of one every 37.89 minutes that campaign, according to Premier League analysis of the partnership.
This season has started the same way. Cherki came off the bench in Gameweek 1 away at Bournemouth, played just 27 minutes, and still returned 8 points. In Gameweek 2, given a start away at Crystal Palace, he scored twice in a 4-1 win — one an instinctive finish, the other struck with his weaker foot from outside the box.
Two matches, two different routes to a return. Neither needed a full 90 minutes to matter, and that's the part the top managers appear to have clocked early.
It's likely also why the wider game has been slower to follow. A player who started the season as a substitute, in a City forward line that also features Erling Haaland, Foden and Jeremy Doku, doesn't read as a guaranteed starter from the team sheet alone. A price tag that's already risen twice makes the case a little harder still for a manager working with a fixed budget.
One thing this isn't is a captaincy story. Just 0.6% of the top 992 gave Cherki the armband in Gameweek 3 — barely any of them. The elite ownership here looks like squad value and differential upside, not a plan to make him the headline pick of a gameweek.
Bawler's own projection engine, which forecasts points forward from here, is more cautious than the ownership numbers suggest. It rates Cherki 'rated' rather than its top tier, projects him for 58 minutes and 3.79 points per gameweek, and puts his chance of a big haul at 8.9% against a 66.5% chance of blanking. The model, in short, still treats him as a rotation risk even as the sharpest managers in the game hold him in more than half their squads.
What that tells you: the top managers appear to have spotted a role change and an early scoring rate before the rest of the game caught up. That's evidence worth weighing, not an instruction. It doesn't tell you Cherki keeps his place once Doku is back to full fitness, or that a 27-minute cameo for 8 points repeats itself. The ownership gap is real. What happens to his minutes from here is still an open question — including for the managers who already own him.