João Pedro started the season in 97.2% of the squads run by the top 994 managers in Fantasy Premier League's overall rankings. Across the rest of the game's 13 million-plus squads, only 67.6% had him in. That is a 29.6-point gap between what the elite did at the Gameweek 1 deadline and what everyone else did, and one of the widest of any forward at his price. It is worth asking what the best managers in the country saw that a third of the field did not.
This is not a gap built on a free pick. João Pedro cost £7.6m to field, tying up real squad budget rather than sitting there as a cheap spare part to help fund Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah together. When managers commit that kind of money and the split between the elite and everyone else is this wide, it usually points to conviction about a role, not a hopeful cheap pick.
That conviction had a clear source. Chelsea handed João Pedro the number 9 shirt this summer, taking it off Liam Delap and confirming him as Xabi Alonso's first-choice striker before a ball had been kicked. It followed a debut season good enough to win him the club's Player of the Season award, with 20 goals and nine assists in 50 appearances. Chelsea are also reported to be working on a new contract that would nearly double his wages, and turned down interest from Barcelona over the summer without much hesitation. None of that shows up in a projected-points number. It is the kind of detail a manager who reads every squad and every transfer picks up before it filters through to ownership charts, and it goes a long way to explaining why the elite moved early while the rest of the game waited to see it for themselves.
The hesitation from the other third of the game is explainable too. Chelsea's opening fixture, away at Fulham, was not among the gameweek's eye-catching draws. Nicolas Jackson had returned to the squad after a season out on loan, and with Marc Guiu also around, some managers may have wanted the pecking order confirmed on the pitch rather than in a squad-numbers announcement. £7.6m is not a small outlay either, when a squad still needs Haaland or Salah at the top of it. For a lot of managers, that money went elsewhere.
The clearest sign of elite conviction is the armband. 31.4% of the top 994 managers made João Pedro their captain in that single gameweek, a notably high share for a forward at his price and normally a number reserved for a nailed-on premium. That figure describes Gameweek 1 alone; it says nothing about how often they captained him afterwards. But in the week it mattered, close to a third of the country's best managers trusted him with double points.
The early return backed the trust: João Pedro opened his season with 11 points in that first gameweek. Bawler's projection model is more measured about what comes next. It rates him a "rated" tier forward, projected for 75 minutes and 4.55 points a gameweek, with a 12.2% chance of a big haul and a 72.5% chance of blanking in any given week. That is not a contradiction of the ownership numbers, it is a reminder that role security and week-to-week returns are different things. The elite trusted the role. The points, according to the model, are still more likely than not to come up empty in any single gameweek.
None of this promises anything about the rest of the season. A 29.6-point ownership gap at one deadline shows where sharp, well-informed squads put their money early, not that João Pedro repeats it, and not an instruction to buy him. Chelsea's pecking order can change, injuries happen, and the projection model itself rates a blank as more likely than a return in any given week. What the gap does show is that when the elite spent real money on a forward this early, they had specific reasons the rest of the game had not yet priced in: a new shirt number, a new contract in the works, and a manager who had already made his choice.