Bart Verbruggen started in 51.4% of the top 994 Fantasy Premier League squads at the Gameweek 1 deadline. Across the rest of the game, only 21.5% of teams picked him. That gap - 29.9 points - is one of the widest of any goalkeeper in this season's data, and it is worth working out exactly what it does and does not mean before reading anything else into it.
Start with the price. Verbruggen costs £4.5m, towards the cheap end for a goalkeeper. None of the 994 top managers gave him the captain's armband in Gameweek 1 either. Put those two things together and this stops looking like a differential the elite spotted early and starts looking like something more mundane: a squad-structure decision. A cheap goalkeeper who is heavily owned at the top but not lower down the game is usually there to free up money for someone else, not to win gameweeks on his own.
The case for him as that goalkeeper was there to be found before a ball was kicked. Verbruggen is Brighton's undisputed number one under manager Fabian Hurzeler and played every minute of all 38 league games last season. He kept ten clean sheets - the first Albion goalkeeper to reach double figures since Robert Sanchez four years earlier - and his shot-stopping ranked fourth in the Premier League, with his saves outperforming what an average keeper would have stopped by more than five goals. Brighton conceded just 46 goals last season, the third-fewest in the division. None of that guarantees anything for this season, but it is exactly the kind of record a manager doing the homework on the cheapest reliable option would want to see.
Gameweek 1 went as well as that homework suggested it might. Brighton beat Aston Villa 4-0 at home, a game that turned further in their favour when Villa's João Gomes was sent off before half-time. Verbruggen played the full 90 minutes and kept the clean sheet, banking the 6 points the data shows for him - the standard return for a goalkeeper who plays at least 60 minutes and doesn't concede, with nothing extra from bonus points or a heavy save count. It was a routine, low-drama match for a routine, low-drama pick.
That is really the point. Goalkeeper is the position where paying more buys the least. A £4.5m keeper who starts every week and a £6m keeper at a similar club will usually earn similar points across a season, because the scoring is capped by clean sheets and saves regardless of price. Managers who structure their squads well tend to know this, so they spend as little as possible in goal and push the saved money into their forward line or a second premium defender. That is the mechanism behind the 29.9-point gap: it is a budgeting decision that shows up in the ownership numbers, not a secret about Verbruggen's ability that the rest of the game missed. Most managers, by contrast, tend to default to a bigger name in goal, or simply had not revisited their goalkeeper spend by the Gameweek 1 deadline.
Our projection engine's read on Verbruggen going forward fits that picture. It rates him "rated" tier, projecting 2.3 points per gameweek and 81 minutes - close to a guaranteed start. But the ceiling is thin: a 1.3% chance of a big haul in any given week against a 71.8% chance of a blank. That is the trade-off with a pick like this. The floor is solid, built on his save numbers and Brighton's defensive record. He is not projected to win anyone a gameweek by himself.
So what does the 29.9-point gap actually tell a reader? It shows that at one specific moment - the Gameweek 1 deadline - the best-performing managers in the sample were more than twice as likely as the average squad to have Verbruggen between the posts, and that none of them saw him as anything more than a reliable, cheap starter. It is not a record of how often he goes on to return points across the season; nothing in this data measures that, and no figure for it should be inferred from what's here. An ownership gap this size on a budget goalkeeper is evidence the elite had done the sums on price and nailed-on minutes. It is not a promise, and enablers by their nature earn their place by not costing points rather than by scoring many of them.