In gameweek 3, Cody Gakpo sat in 41.4% of the squads run by Bawler's top 992 managers — more than two in five of the best teams in the game. Across the whole of FPL, he was owned by just 12.5% of squads. That's a 28.9-point gap between the elite sample and the field, one of the widest of the season on a player at his price. Yet almost none of those elite managers actually gave him the armband: in that same gameweek, only 0.5% of the top sample captained him. That isn't a contradiction. It's the whole story.
At £7.2m, this isn't the profile of a cheap squad-filler bought to release funds for premiums elsewhere. Gakpo has 28 points already this season heading into gameweek 4 — more than nine a game across the first three rounds, a return plenty of £10m-plus forwards would take. He's a mid-price player producing like a much more expensive one, and it's on the pitch, not just in a spreadsheet, that the elite spotted him first.
The mechanism sits in how new Liverpool manager Andoni Iraola is using him. Iraola has been explicit about it: "I think it's good to have Cody because he can play in the three positions up top." Against Ipswich Town in gameweek 3, Gakpo set up both of Alexander Isak's goals inside the first ten minutes — a mazy turnover-to-pass for the first, a no-look assist for the second — then finished the game at centre-forward once Isak was withdrawn. Every one of Isak's goals this season has come from a Gakpo pass. That's not one good afternoon; it's a role.
That level of direct goal involvement, three games into a new manager's tenure, is exactly the sort of signal an ownership gap like this usually reflects: the elite reading a role change before the price and the headlines catch up. It helps explain why 12.5% is still such a low number for a player producing at this level — the wider game is naturally slower to move than a sample that's actively hunting for players outperforming their price. There's a genuine caveat too, and Iraola gave it himself: with new signings Barcola and Ngumoha also in the squad, "sometimes they will start, sometimes they come from the bench, sometimes they will not play." The competition for those front-three shirts hasn't gone away.
That caveat is probably why the ownership gap and the captaincy figure point in different directions. Bawler's projection engine has Gakpo down for 4.55 points a gameweek, 72 minutes of game time, and puts him in its "rated" tier — solid, not top bracket. The same model gives him an 11.5% chance of a double-figure haul but a 51.5% chance of blanking in any given week. Managers who own a player like that tend to use him as a source of steady returns, not the focal point of their gameweek. That fits what the numbers show: plenty of elite squads own Gakpo, almost none of them are leading their week with him.
None of this is a guarantee. An ownership gap this size tells you where the sharpest managers in the game have put a squad slot, and by extension what they rate about a role change at Liverpool — not what happens in gameweek 4 or beyond. A 51.5% blank chance is a real number too: more often than not, on Bawler's own model, Gakpo won't return anything in a given week. The rotation risk Iraola flagged isn't hypothetical either — Barcola and Ngumoha are both in the squad for a reason. What the data does show is that a player directly involved in a match-winning display — two assists in ten minutes, all three of Isak's goals this season — tends to show up in the elite ownership numbers before it shows up anywhere else. Whether that keeps happening is a different question, and one the ownership figures alone can't answer.