John Egan was in 34.2% of the top 992 Fantasy Premier League squads at the Gameweek 3 deadline. Across the whole game — more than 13 million teams — only 6.1% of managers owned him. That's a 28.1-point ownership gap, one of the widest of the season for a player nobody expected to matter. The obvious question is why the best-ranked managers in the game were on a cheap Hull City centre-back that almost everyone else ignored.
Egan is a 33-year-old Irish centre-back who signed for Hull from Burnley in February 2025 and was a first-team fixture as the club won promotion to the Premier League last season. At £4.1m, his price sits close to the bottom of the defender pool — the kind of player normally bought purely to free up budget for bigger names elsewhere, not to produce returns of his own. But Egan has already scored 23 points this season. For a defender at that price, that's a return that looks more like a value pick than a squad-filler.
Coming into the season, the outside advice on Hull's defence was to stay away. The club conceded 66 goals in the Championship last season, one of the weaker defensive records among the teams that went up, and pre-season previews flagged their back line as a likely source of blanks rather than clean sheets. Hull's defenders — Egan included — started the season priced at the bottom of the market for that reason.
What actually happened contradicted that. Hull play a back three, a 5-4-1 shape that turns all three centre-backs into regular starters rather than rotation risks, and Egan played every minute of it. Hull won their opening two matches, against Manchester United and Coventry City, and kept clean sheets in both — defying the pre-season pessimism about their defence. Egan's price has since ticked up to £4.1m, a small rise that only happens when enough managers buy a player to move the market. That is itself a sign of who was paying attention early.
There's a second layer to it. Managers in the top 992 tend to react to results and role rather than setting a squad in August and leaving it alone. When Hull's results contradicted the pre-season line on their defence, and when Egan kept starting every match at the back, the top sample moved to bring him in — not as a matchwinner, but as a source of low-cost points inside a squad built around bigger names elsewhere. None of them gave him the captain's armband in Gameweek 3; he's a value pick, not a player they expect to explode.
The rest of the game, on the whole, hadn't reacted the same way. Most of the 13 million-plus managers who don't reshuffle every week either fixed their squads before a ball was kicked, or saw a newly promoted side's bottom-priced centre-back and moved on without a second look. That is a reasonable thing to do with most promoted-team defenders — most of them do go on to blank a lot. Egan, so far, has been the exception, and the ownership numbers show the top sample noticed faster than the field.
The site's own projection engine is far more cautious about what happens from here. It has Egan down for 3.14 points per gameweek going forward, with projected minutes of 83 — just short of a full match, which hints at some rotation risk. Hull's assistant manager, Dean Holden, said early substitutions in Gameweek 1 were mostly down to fatigue and cramp in his centre-backs, Egan among them, which may be part of what sits behind that caution. The engine also rates him 'thin' — its label for a shorter track record to project from, since this is Egan's first season at this level — with only a 3.8% chance of a big scoring gameweek and a 52% chance of blanking completely in any given week.
None of that means the ownership gap was wrong. Egan started the season delivering points few expected from a £4.1m defender, and the best-ranked managers were quicker to notice than most of the game. He has also just signed a new two-year contract with Hull, a sign the club see him as a fixture rather than a stopgap. But an early run against two winnable-looking fixtures isn't proof he'll keep doing it every week, and the projection engine's own numbers now point to something closer to ordinary returns with real risk of a blank. The gap tells you where the best-informed managers already were. It doesn't tell you where they go next.