Caoimhín Kelleher started Gameweek 3 in 28.3% of the top 992 Fantasy Premier League squads in bawler's elite sample, managers picked from the very top of the Overall Fantasy rankings. Across the other roughly 13 million squads in the game, he sat in just 6.9%. That's a 21.4-point gap: the best managers were doing one thing at that single Gameweek 3 deadline, and everyone else was doing another. It's a snapshot, not a trend across the season.
At £5.0m, Kelleher isn't the cheapest goalkeeper in the game, and he wasn't picked purely to save money either. He sits in the middle of the goalkeeper price bracket. Eleven points after three gameweeks, and a projected 3.34 points per gameweek from bawler's projection engine, describe a keeper doing a proper job in goal — not spectacular, but real. This isn't the usual "cheap makeweight bought to free up cash for elsewhere" story. It reads closer to a differentiator: a player the elite found early for what he does, not for what he costs.
His route there matters. Kelleher left Liverpool for Brentford last summer specifically to get regular first-team football after years as back-up, taking over as Brentford's goalkeeper from Mark Flekken, who moved on to Bayer Leverkusen. He didn't need easing in. He was first-choice for the whole of the 2025/26 season.
That season answered the obvious question of whether he was ready for it. Kelleher finished as the second-highest scoring goalkeeper in the whole of Fantasy Premier League, on 143 points, and was the only goalkeeper to save more than one penalty all season — he saved three. A saved penalty is worth five points in FPL, the sort of swing that turns a quiet match into a good one, and Kelleher had already shown, more than once, that he could produce it.
This season has started the same way. Brentford opened with a 3-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur, Kelleher kept a clean sheet, and match ratings had him as one of the best performers on the pitch that day. Eleven points from three gameweeks sits close to what the projection engine now expects from him each gameweek going forward.
That's the case for why the best-informed managers were in early: a full season of proven, above-average goalkeeper output, a settled role as an undisputed number one, and a price that still sits mid-table for the position rather than at the top of it. None of that is loud. Goalkeepers almost never wear the armband — not one manager in the top sample captained Kelleher in Gameweek 3 — so there's no big moment to pull the wider game's attention toward him. A goalkeeper's value builds quietly, in save points and clean sheets stacking up over months, and that sort of signal is easy for a casual glance at team news to miss, and easier still for managers who track the underlying numbers every week to catch.
The projection engine isn't calling him a special pick either. It rates him "rated" rather than in a higher tier, projects 85 minutes — essentially a guaranteed start — and puts the chance of a big scoring gameweek at just 2.9%. More tellingly, it puts the chance of him blanking, returning next to nothing, at 58.2%. Most gameweeks, in other words, Kelleher will do very little for your score. The case for him was never that he explodes. It's that his floor, across a season, has already proven higher than most of the game credited it with.
None of this promises anything about what comes next. A gap this size shows what the best-performing managers believed at one deadline, built on a real season of history behind Kelleher and a settled Brentford side in front of him. It doesn't tell you Brentford keep clean sheets at the same rate all season, or that Kelleher stays first-choice and fit throughout it. With a 58.2% projected blank rate, patience is part of owning him even for those who rate him highly. It's worth knowing why the top of the game got there first. It isn't a reason to assume you should follow.