At the Gameweek 2 deadline, 66.3% of the top 997 managers in the Overall game — the sample Bawler tracks every night to see what the best-ranked squads actually do — owned Bart Verbruggen. Across the other 13 million-odd squads in FPL, only 21.7% did. That's a 44.6-point gap between the elite and everyone else on a £4.5m Brighton goalkeeper, and it's worth asking what the top of the table saw that the rest of the game didn't.
Start with what kind of pick this is. At £4.5m, Verbruggen sits at the budget end of the goalkeeper position, and Bawler's own projection engine doesn't rate him as a scoring project: 3.28 points per gameweek going forward, an 83-minute expected involvement, just a 1.7% chance of a big haul in any given week and a 58.3% chance of blanking. Nobody in the top sample gave him the captain's armband in Gameweek 2 either. This isn't a differential bought to win a gameweek on its own. It's a squad-structure pick — a keeper bought to cost as little as possible so the money saved can go on someone who can actually win you points elsewhere.
The case for him as that keeper was built last season. Brighton conceded the third-fewest goals in the Premier League, and Verbruggen was a big part of why: 106 saves, the third-most of any goalkeeper in the division, and 10 clean sheets across his appearances. For a nailed-on starter at the cheap end of the position, that's about as strong a track record as the role allows. Going into 2026/27, he had no obvious competition for the Brighton gloves.
What he did have was a transfer saga. Verbruggen's performances, including a strong World Cup, drew serious interest from Bayern Munich, who saw him as the man to eventually succeed Manuel Neuer, plus reported links to Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham. The Bayern move specifically hinged on Neuer himself deciding whether to retire or play on, and he kept delaying that decision through the summer. Brighton, for their part, weren't lining up an immediate like-for-like replacement — Carl Rushworth, on loan at Coventry, was being developed as a long-term successor, not an instant one. So even in a scenario where Verbruggen left, there was no ready-made alternative to hand the gloves to overnight.
That limbo was still live at the Gameweek 2 deadline. The transfer window didn't close until 1 September, and Neuer's decision — the thing the whole Verbruggen-to-Bayern move depended on — hadn't landed when both samples in this data set picked their squads. Bayern ultimately stuck with Neuer and the move never happened, but nobody owning Verbruggen at the Gameweek 2 deadline knew that yet.
That's a plausible reading of the gap. A goalkeeper who might be sold mid-window is an awkward thing to build a fantasy squad around, and for most managers, with straightforward alternatives available, it was simpler to look elsewhere. The top 997 evidently judged the downside as small: at £4.5m, with no successor in place even if a move had gone through, and with a track record that made him the standout name at his price, the risk of holding him was limited next to the budget he freed up. That's a squad-construction call, not a prediction about his own points.
It's also worth being honest about what the numbers say now. Verbruggen has six points from his first two matches of the season, and Bawler's projection model — 3.28 points per gameweek, a 58.3% chance of blanking — doesn't currently rate him as an attacking or bonus-point threat. The case for him was never about him being the highest scorer in the squad. It was about what a nailed, low-cost starter lets a manager do with the rest of the budget.
None of this tells you what happens next. The transfer scare has passed and Verbruggen remains Brighton's goalkeeper, but that's a statement about who's in goal, not a promise about clean sheets or points from here. A gap this size between the elite and the field is evidence that the best-ranked managers read a specific piece of transfer news correctly and were prepared to hold their nerve through it — not a guarantee that holding him now, with the uncertainty resolved, carries the same value it did at the Gameweek 2 deadline.