By the Gameweek 2 deadline, 42.1% of the top 995 managers in the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings had Iliman Ndiaye in their squad. Across the wider game — all thirteen million-odd registered teams — only 13.6% did. That's a 28.5-point gap between what the best-performing managers in the country were doing and what everyone else was doing, one of the widest ownership splits of the season so far, and it sits on top of one of the stranger stories of the transfer window.
Start with what kind of player Ndiaye actually is, because it matters. At £6.0m he isn't a cut-price squad filler bought to free up money for somebody else's premium — he already has 13 points on the board from the season's first two gameweeks. This is a mid-price midfielder doing a job, not an enabler, which makes the ownership gap a genuine case of the elite finding value early rather than simply hoarding a cheap bench option.
That value case started at Everton. Ndiaye met the threshold for defensive contribution points — the two points on offer to a midfielder who racks up 12 combined tackles, interceptions, blocks, clearances and ball recoveries in a match — in both of the season's opening gameweeks, according to Fantasy Football Scout. That's a route to a return that doesn't depend on a goal or an assist, and it gave a £6.0m midfielder a floor most players at that price don't have.
Then, on transfer deadline day, the picture changed completely. Manchester City — now under Enzo Maresca after Pep Guardiola stepped down in the summer — paid Everton an initial £65m for Ndiaye, filling the gap left by Savio and Omar Marmoush, both of whom had joined Tottenham Hotspur. A Senegal international with two solid Premier League seasons behind him, comfortable on either flank or through the middle, had just walked into one of the two or three best squads in England. His FPL price didn't move. He was still £6.0m — cheaper than Phil Foden, Jeremy Doku and Rayan Cherki, and a fraction of Erling Haaland's £15.5m.
That mismatch is the mechanism behind the ownership gap. The top 995 managers read squads and transfer news closely enough — whether by holding Ndiaye already from his Everton form or moving fastest once City's interest became known — to be in place while his price still reflected a squad player at a mid-table club, not a newly-signed Manchester City attacker. A near-30-point swing in ownership like that usually means one group acted on information before the price caught up with it, and that looks like what happened here.
It also explains why so much of the game stayed away. City's forward line was already crowded before Ndiaye arrived, and Haaland isn't giving up the penalties. Working out where a deadline-day signing fits into a stacked attack, two games into a new manager's first season, is genuinely difficult — and the projection model reflects that difficulty rather than waving it away. It places him in its "rated" tier, projects 3.83 points a gameweek from 76 minutes, and gives him a 7.0% chance of a big haul against a 43.3% chance of blanking. Tellingly, not one of the top 995 gave him the captain's armband in Gameweek 2 either. This was a squad decision, not a week-winning gamble.
None of that makes the caution wrong. A crowded team sheet is a real risk, and the numbers around Ndiaye — modest projected points, a low haul chance, a blank chance still above two in five — say he's a squad piece worth having rather than a standout pick right now.
What the ownership gap does tell you is where conviction sat at one moment in a two-game-old season: the best-performing managers in the country were positioned in a newly-signed Manchester City forward while he still carried an Everton price tag. What it doesn't tell you is what happens next. That depends on team news and Maresca's selection from here, not on anything already sitting in this data.