In Gameweek 3, Foden sat in 31.8% of the squads run by the top 992 managers in the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings — the group Bawler tracks every night to see what the best players in the game are doing. Across the rest of the game, he was in just 5.1% of squads. That's a 26.7-point gap between how the elite were treating him and how the field was.
It matters what kind of player is sitting inside that gap. Foden is a £7m midfielder, not a £4.5m squad-filler bought purely to free up money for Haaland or Salah. He had returned 11 points through three gameweeks — solid, not spectacular. A gap this size on a player at this price is not the pattern you see with a nothing pick. It's the pattern you see when the best managers have identified a change in role before the price and the ownership numbers have caught up with it.
That change has a name: Kevin De Bruyne. City's long-serving creative hub left for Napoli this summer, and with him went the club's most reliable source of chances for others. Foden is now the closest thing City have to his replacement in the No.10 role, and his on-pitch responsibilities are widely expected to grow because of it. That was being written about before a ball was kicked this season, with City needing a 'refreshed' Foden to help fill the void De Bruyne left behind.
There's a fitness story underneath the role change too. Foden was left out of England's squad for the September internationals and used the break to rest rather than travel. 'I just rested and got my mind right for this season,' he said, after a previous campaign — 10 goals and five assists across all competitions — that fell short of what the club expects of him. He opened this season with a goal and an assist in the Club World Cup, his first goal since January, then followed it with two assists in his first two Premier League appearances. None of that is a season-long scoring rate — it's three data points — but it's the kind of early signal a manager reading squads every night, rather than checking a table once a week, would notice.
The fixture lined up too. City's Gameweek 3 match was at home to newly promoted Coventry, the kind of game that tends to flatter anyone getting minutes in a City shirt. Put a fresher Foden, a bigger attacking role and a kind fixture together, and there's a specific, explainable reason why 31.8% of the best squads in the game owned him that week, while general ownership sat at 5.1% — low enough that he was barely on the wider game's radar at all.
What the top managers did not do is trust him with the armband. Just 0.2% of that same elite sample captained him in Gameweek 3 — next to nobody. That distinction matters: this looks like a squad decision built on role and fixture, not a conviction he was about to produce the outright top score of the gameweek. Bawler's projection engine, which forecasts his points independently of ownership, points the same way. It rates him at a projected 3.45 points for an average gameweek, off around 60 minutes rather than a guaranteed 90, with only a 7.5% chance of a big haul and a 66.9% chance of blanking altogether. That's a player expected to do a job over a run of matches, not one flagged to explode in any single week.
What does this actually tell a manager thinking ahead? It shows that the managers with the best records in the game moved on Foden earlier and in far greater numbers than the rest of the game did, and it shows a specific, checkable reason why: a genuine change in his role at City, a fresher start to the season than most of his attacking rivals, and a fixture that suited him. It does not show he is guaranteed to keep producing. His season total is still modest, and the projection engine's own numbers point to more blank gameweeks ahead than big ones. An ownership gap like this is evidence worth weighing, not an instruction to follow.