Cole Palmer's shirt sat in 43.5% of the 997 best squads in the game at the Gameweek 2 deadline. Those are the squads inside the Overall Fantasy Premier League rankings that Bawler tracks every night - the top of the entire game. Across the other roughly 13 million squads out there, only 18.4% owned him. That's a 25.1 percentage point gap between the sharpest managers in the game and everyone else, at the same moment, on the same player.
That gap matters more here than it would on a cheap player. At £9.6m, Palmer isn't a budget pick bought to free up cash for someone else - he's one of the most expensive midfielders in the game. A 25.1-point gap on a player at that price means the top managers weren't economising. They were making a specific call that Palmer was worth a big chunk of the budget when most of the field wasn't ready to commit it. Twenty points through two gameweeks is an early sign that call was reasonable.
The wider game's caution has an obvious source. Palmer's 2025/26 season was wrecked by injury: he missed 19 games for club and country across two separate spells, the second extended by a broken toe suffered in a freak accident at home. That run of absences was serious enough to cost him a place in England's World Cup squad. For a manager picking a team in August, that history is recent. Putting close to a tenth of your budget into a player who missed a fifth of last season through injury is a harder call than putting it into someone with a clean bill of health, which is likely why so much of the game held back.
The best managers appear to have moved on newer information. Palmer had a full pre-season under Chelsea's new head coach, Xabi Alonso, working with him from day one at the club's Cobham training ground. Alonso has called him "world class" and built a role for him that lets him play as a No.10, a No.8 or a winger, rather than squeezing him out to accommodate Morgan Rogers. Palmer then started the season involved in Chelsea's opening game against Fulham, with Alonso praising his performance afterwards. None of that guarantees fitness holds up. But it's the kind of role and pre-season signal that a manager reading training-ground reports and opening-weekend performances closely would have picked up well before the ownership numbers moved.
There's a caveat inside Bawler's own data. Only 0.1% of that same top sample gave Palmer the captaincy in Gameweek 2. So the elite backed him with a squad slot far more than they trusted him with the armband - conviction to own, not yet conviction to lead. Bawler's projection engine, which forecasts points independently of ownership, is in a similar place: it rates Palmer "rated" tier, projects 3.66 points for him per gameweek, and puts the chance of a big haul at just 7.7% against a 61.0% chance of a blank. Even the model sitting next to the elite-ownership numbers isn't calling him an explosive week-to-week option right now.
None of this is a guarantee. A 25.1-point ownership gap tells you the best managers in the game priced in Palmer's changed role and clean pre-season earlier than most of the field did - it doesn't tell you he keeps producing, and the managers who own him aren't yet trusting him with their captaincy either. Palmer's injury history is real and recent, and the projection engine's own numbers describe a player more likely to blank than haul in any given week. Read the gap as evidence the sharpest managers moved early, not as an instruction to follow them.