At the Gameweek 2 deadline this season, 98.8% of the top 995 managers in bawler's overall-rankings sample owned João Pedro. Across the whole game - every one of the thirteen million or so Fantasy Premier League squads - that figure was 69.8%. That's a 29-percentage-point gap between the two ownership figures, all inside a single gameweek, on one player.
Before asking why, it's worth checking what sort of player produces a gap like that. João Pedro isn't cheap: he's priced at £7.7m, solidly mid-price for a forward, and he had already scored 20 points through two gameweeks. This isn't a budget squeeze pick bought to sit quietly and free up funds elsewhere. This is a forward the sharpest managers in the game wanted in their starting eleven to actually produce.
The reasons trace back to before a ball was kicked. João Pedro was voted Chelsea's Player of the Year last season, scoring 20 goals in all competitions. When the club confirmed its 2026/27 squad numbers, he was given the number 9 shirt - stripped from Liam Delap, whose debut season had brought just one Premier League goal. Delap was handed the number 12 and made available for a transfer this window. It was about as explicit a statement of who Chelsea's first-choice striker is as a football club makes.
Xabi Alonso, appointed after Enzo Maresca was sacked on New Year's Day, took charge of Chelsea's opening match of the season away at Fulham - a 3-2 win - and trusted João Pedro through the middle. Pedro scored inside a minute, assisted by Cole Palmer, then teed up a Palmer goal himself in the second half. A week later, at home to his old club Brighton, he did it again: a goal and an assist in a 4-3 win, alongside an own goal in a chaotic afternoon that didn't stop Chelsea taking the points. Sky Sports pundit Alan Smith called it the form of his career: "I haven't seen him play better than he has in the first two games."
None of that was hidden information. The shirt number was public before the season started; the goals and assists were live for anyone watching. What the ownership gap shows is how quickly, and how completely, the sharpest managers in the game acted on it. A player installed as his club's explicit first choice, whose only serious competition for the shirt had been made available for sale, then delivering in both his opening matches, is about as clear a case as August produces. That the wider game still had almost a third of its managers without him by Gameweek 2 speaks to reaction speed and competing priorities elsewhere in the squad, not to the story being obscure.
One number tempers the picture. In Gameweek 2 itself - this is a single-gameweek split, not a record of how the top managers used the armband across the season - just 0.1% of the top sample captained João Pedro. They wanted him in the side, not leading it. Across the wider game, Erling Haaland took by far the largest share of armbands that week. The elite treated João Pedro as a high-conviction addition to the XI, not as their headline captaincy call.
Bawler's projection engine, which looks ahead rather than back, is more measured than the ownership numbers or the opening fortnight suggest. It expects him to keep starting - 79 projected minutes a gameweek, close to an ever-present - but rates his output going forward at 3.4 points per gameweek, placing him in its 'rated' tier. It gives him an 80.3% chance of a blank (two points or fewer) in a given week, against a 6.1% chance of a haul (a double-digit points return). The model isn't projecting a repeat of the first two weeks so much as a nailed starter whose returns are expected to cool.
That's the tension worth holding onto. The ownership gap is real evidence that the best managers in the game moved early on a specific, checkable story - a vacated number 9 shirt, a demoted rival, a new manager's trust repaid twice over. It isn't proof the returns keep arriving at the rate of the first two gameweeks, and bawler's own forward-looking numbers are considerably cooler than his early season total. A player nearly every one of the sharpest teams in the game owns is worth taking seriously. Whether 3.4 points a week undersells him, or fairly prices in some cooling after a red-hot opening, is a question only the rest of the season will settle.