Cole Palmer sat in 43.4% of the 995 highest-ranked Fantasy Premier League squads at the Gameweek 2 deadline this season. Across every other squad in the game, that figure was 18.3%. The gap between the two — 25.1 percentage points — is one of the widest Bawler has measured this season, and it sits on a £9.6m midfielder with 20 points from his opening two matches, not a cut-price bench option. When elite managers pay a premium price for a player the rest of the game is still leaving out, that is worth asking about.
Start with why the wider game was cautious. Palmer's 2025/26 campaign, under then-manager Enzo Maresca, was disrupted by a recurring groin problem that forced him off after 21 minutes against Manchester United and ruled him out for weeks at a time. Chelsea's results told their own story: their win rate with him in the side was 52.2%, against 36.4% without him, and Maresca said plainly, 'We need him, no doubt. With Cole we are a better team.' The same injury clouded his England picture too — manager Thomas Tuchel called it 'a very dangerous one to become chronic' and Palmer missed five of England's last seven camps heading into the World Cup year. A player who spent a season in and out of a treatment room, with his place in his country's squad genuinely in doubt, is not an obvious buy for a manager picking a team once a week.
That caution carried into preseason. New Chelsea manager Xabi Alonso rested Palmer for a friendly against Juventus with what he called 'a contact injury... not a big thing, but we want to be cautious' — a sensible line, given Palmer's history of groin trouble and a previous ACL injury. João Pedro deputised in the number 10 role while Palmer was out, and Palmer's price settled at £9.5m for the season launch: expensive for a player who still had a fitness question mark next to his name.
Then came Alonso's first game in charge, a 3-2 win over Fulham on 24 August. Palmer set up a goal inside the first minute, scored one himself in the second half, had five shots and created three more chances, and picked up maximum bonus points for a 13-point haul while owned by only 14% of the game. Team-mate Morgan Rogers called him 'the best one on the pitch by a mile.' Alonso's own description of the performance pointed at something structural, not just a good day: Palmer had played 'with responsibility, with maturity, but as well with freedom' in a role built to get more of the ball into his feet. That is the kind of detail — a tactical change validated by an immediate, obvious return — that a manager tracking preseason and matchday-one team news closely is positioned to catch before the price and the ownership move.
It came with a catch. Palmer was substituted late against Fulham after what Alonso put down to cramp rather than a new injury, and by the next match, against West Ham, he was withdrawn from the starting eleven in the warm-up with a fresh groin scare. A scan brought better news — 'positive, better than he first feared, nothing serious' — but the caution around a quick return was obvious, with one pundit noting a swift comeback might come 'too soon.' That is very likely why the 43.4% of top managers who owned Palmer at the Gameweek 2 deadline did not lean on him: only 0.1% gave him the captain's armband that week. They were prepared to hold the asset through a fitness scare they judged, correctly, to be minor. They were not prepared to make their whole gameweek depend on him.
Bawler's own projection model, built from live signals rather than his history, is telling a similarly careful story for the gameweek ahead. It has Palmer in its 'rated' tier, projected for 3.66 points from 79 minutes — short of a guaranteed 90 — with a 7.7% chance of a big haul and a 61.0% chance of blanking. None of those numbers scream nailed explosive returner right now. They describe a good player being carefully managed back from a fright, which is exactly what the last fortnight of team news suggests he is.
The wider game has started to move — Palmer's price has already ticked up from £9.5m in preseason to £9.6m at the Gameweek 2 deadline, evidence that some managers bought in after the Fulham haul. But that movement has been nowhere near enough to close a 25.1-point gap. Most of the game is still going off last season's injury list and this season's warm-up scare. The top 995 are going off a role change they saw coming and a scan that came back clean.
What does that actually prove? That a specific, well-resourced group of managers made a considered call on Palmer's role and fitness before most of the game caught up — not that he is now a safe pick. The same managers who back him in the squad would not back him with the armband in the very gameweek this data was measured, and his injury history means a repeat scare cannot be ruled out. An ownership gap this size is a signal that the best-performing part of the game trusts something the rest of it doesn't yet see. It is evidence worth weighing, not a result anyone can promise.