In Gameweek 2 of the 2026/27 season, 75.3% of the top 995 Fantasy Premier League squads — the elite sample Bawler tracks every night — owned Bryan Mbeumo. Among the rest of the game, only 29.8% did. That's a 45.5-point gap, one of the widest ownership splits in the data this season. It's a single-gameweek reading, not a season-long trend, but it's wide enough to ask why the best managers in the game and everyone else landed in such different places on the same player.
Start with what sort of pick this is. At £8.0m, Mbeumo is not a cut-price squad-filler bought to free up budget for someone else — he's a mid-priced midfielder already on 13 points after two gameweeks. A gap this size on a player at this price usually means one thing: some managers found a genuine edge before the wider game caught up. This looks like exactly that.
The edge traces back to a decision Michael Carrick made last season, well before a ball was kicked in 2026/27. Once Carrick took permanent charge at Old Trafford, one of his first changes was to push Mbeumo — bought from Brentford as a wide forward — into a central, out-and-out striker's role. It worked: Mbeumo scored in three of his first four matches playing there. He kept the role through pre-season this summer while Benjamin Sesko, United's senior number nine, worked his way back from a shin injury picked up in May. Managers who had followed that switch closely went into the new season knowing Mbeumo was United's most central attacking threat — registered as a midfielder for scoring purposes, doing a striker's job on the pitch.
Then Gameweek 1 happened. United lost 2-0 away to newly promoted Hull City, a result nobody saw coming. Mbeumo still played the full 90 minutes and stayed heavily involved — United's only clear chance of the second half fell to him, saved by Hull's goalkeeper — and he was moved into the middle at half-time as United searched for a way back into the game. But the scoreline is what most of the wider game reacted to. With a home fixture against another newly promoted side, Ipswich Town, up next in Gameweek 2, a large chunk of FPL sold Mbeumo anyway — he was among the most transferred-out midfielders in the game that week. The top managers, by and large, held their ground or bought in. They were pricing the role and the fixture; the rest of the game was pricing the result.
One number in the data tempers the story, though. Despite that 75.3% ownership figure, precisely none of the top 995 squads gave Mbeumo the captain's armband in Gameweek 2 — his captaincy share sits at 0%. The elite backed him with a squad slot, not with the armband. Owning a player and trusting him to lead your points total for the week are different calls, and on this evidence the best managers only made the first one.
Bawler's projection engine, which updates live through the season rather than working off last year's totals, currently rates Mbeumo at 4.62 points per gameweek from here, in the 'rated' tier — solid rather than spectacular. It gives him a 57.8% chance of blanking in a given gameweek against a 12.3% chance of a haul. That's not the profile of a guaranteed points-scorer: on these numbers, he's projected to blank more often than he hauls, which is normal for a dependable, rated-tier midfielder rather than a red flag.
None of this tells us what Mbeumo does next. An ownership gap this size shows that some of the best-performing managers in the game spotted a role change early and backed it before the wider game reacted to one bad scoreline — that's useful evidence about how sharp the top of the game is at reading a team's setup, not a guarantee about future points. The projection numbers themselves stay cautious rather than bullish. Whether the central role holds once Sesko is fully fit, and whether the conviction from the elite sample gets rewarded, is still open — something this data will keep tracking, not something it can settle today.