Bart Verbruggen sat in 66.8% of the top 995 Fantasy Premier League squads in Gameweek 2. Across the other roughly thirteen million teams in the game, that figure was 21.6%. The gap, 45.2 percentage points, is one of the widest of any player in this data. A goalkeeper who costs £4.5m and has scored six points all season is not who you would expect to produce a number like that.
That price and points line matters, because it tells you what kind of pick this is before anything else does. Verbruggen is not a hidden goal threat or a set-piece source the elite spotted early. Bawler's projection engine has him in its "rated" tier, forecasting 3.28 points a gameweek from 83 minutes, with only a 1.7% chance of a big haul and a 58.3% chance of blanking. None of the top 995 gave him the captain's armband in Gameweek 2 either. This is not a player the best managers expect to win them a gameweek. It is a player they are using to spend as little as possible on a position, so the saved money can go somewhere it will actually score.
That is the enabler logic, and it depends on two things holding: the goalkeeper has to be nailed as a starter, and the price has to stay low relative to what he actually does. Verbruggen has passed both tests. He was Brighton's first-choice goalkeeper throughout last season, and his price never moved from £4.5m even after he kept five clean sheets in Brighton's final ten games of 2025-26 — a run strong enough that a rise would have been easy to justify. Managers who track price against output closely would have clocked that: a goalkeeper playing every minute, defending well, and still priced at the bottom of the market.
The defensive record behind him backs that up. From Gameweek 28 of last season onwards, no team in the league allowed fewer big goalscoring chances than Brighton's 18. Across the full campaign, only Arsenal and Manchester City conceded fewer goals than Brighton's 46. None of that guarantees clean sheets this season, and the projection engine's own 58.3% blank chance for Gameweek 2 shows it isn't treating him as a clean-sheet certainty. But it is the kind of underlying context that explains why a nailed, cheap goalkeeper behind a tightening defence looks like reasonable structure, even without expecting him to haul.
There is a second layer to why the ownership split looks the way it does, and it is about information rather than numbers. Verbruggen spent much of the summer at the centre of transfer speculation, with Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Chelsea and Spurs all reported to have interest, and pundits noting Brighton could turn a large profit on the £17m they paid for him. Whether he would even be Brighton's goalkeeper by the time the season started was a genuine question into the summer. Managers who followed that story closely could judge, close to deadline, that he had stayed and was still first-choice. Managers who build their squads earlier, or who pay less attention to that kind of club-level noise, may simply have picked a goalkeeper from a more stable-looking situation instead — not a mistake, just a different amount of information at the point the team was picked.
None of this is a promise about the rest of the season. This data is a single Gameweek 2 snapshot: it shows what the top 995 squads and the wider game looked like at that one deadline, not how Verbruggen has performed across the year or how often he has returned. The projection engine's own numbers, a modest 3.28 points a gameweek and a blank chance above one in two, say the same thing from a different angle: nobody serious is backing him to be a points machine. What the ownership gap does show is that a large share of the best-ranked managers independently reached the same conclusion about squad structure — cheap, nailed, and no better use for that fifth of a million than parking it in goal. Whether that keeps paying off depends on Brighton's form and Verbruggen's own position at the club holding, and neither is guaranteed.