Riccardo Calafiori was in 91.5% of the squads run by the top 997 managers in the Fantasy Premier League rankings at the Gameweek 2 deadline. Across the entire game, only 44.1% of managers owned him. That is a 47.4-point gap between the best and everyone else, on a single Arsenal left-back priced at £5.7m.
That gap is worth pausing on before explaining it. Calafiori is not a cheap squad-filler bought to free up money for the front line — at £5.7m he sits in the middle of the defender price list, and he had already banked 20 points from two gameweeks when this snapshot was taken. This is not an enabler story. It is a story about a defender the best managers paid up for because he was already delivering, while a large chunk of the game hadn't caught up.
The mechanism is straightforward once you look at what Calafiori actually does. He plays as an attacking left-back in a defence that won the Premier League in 2025/26, and he has a habit of arriving in the box or picking out a pass at exactly the moment it counts. Opta's own numbers show the pattern: a goal on the opening day of last season against Manchester United, two assists in the following game against Leeds, then an assist on the opening day of this season against Coventry and another to set up Bukayo Saka's winner in a 1-0 win at Aston Villa in Gameweek 2. That's five goal involvements from four opening-day fixtures across two seasons. That is the return the elite were buying into, and it is also exactly what turned two games into 20 points.
It is worth being precise about what the top managers were and weren't doing with him. In Gameweek 2 alone, just 0.1% of those 997 squads gave Calafiori the captaincy — this is a single-gameweek reading, not a season-long rate, and it shows this was never an armband play. Owning him wasn't a statement that he was their standout scorer of the week. It was a lower-key call: a defender who offered clean-sheet security and a genuine chance of an attacking return, at a price that still left room for the season's biggest names up front.
So why was more than half the game not there? The most obvious answer is fitness. Calafiori missed 12 matches through injury in 2025/26 — a hip problem, a muscle issue, a knee injury and a foot problem all featured across the campaign — and a defender who misses that much football is a harder sell to a manager who only has one defensive slot to give. A lot of the wider game will have watched him produce goal involvement after goal involvement and still hesitated, because the pattern of games missed was just as real as the pattern of games decided. The elite evidently judged the output worth the risk. The rest of the game, on balance, judged the risk worth avoiding — or simply hadn't reacted yet. Ownership of him had been climbing through pre-season on the back of a strong Community Shield, and by Gameweek 2 it may still have been catching up to where the best squads already were.
None of this is a guarantee going forward. Bawler's projection engine rates Calafiori as 'rated' tier rather than its top bracket, projecting 3.65 points per gameweek from 69 minutes — below a nailed-on 90, in keeping with a player whose season has already featured fitness stoppages. The chance of a big haul next time out is put at 7.7%, while the chance of blanking altogether sits at 57.3%. Those numbers describe a defender who is more likely than not to return nothing in any given week, even after the start he has had. The ownership gap tells you the best managers spotted value early and were rewarded for it through two matchdays. It does not tell you that pattern repeats, and it does not make the injury risk that kept much of the game away from him disappear.