At the Gameweek 2 deadline, 39.5% of the top 999 ranked Fantasy Premier League managers had Joško Gvardiol in their squad. Across the whole game, only 15.3% did. That's a 24.2-point gap, and it's worth working out why the best-ranked managers in the game were so much more convinced than everyone else.
Gvardiol isn't a budget pick bought to sit quietly and free up money for elsewhere. At £5.6m he sits at a proper mid-price point for a defender, and he already has 14 points from City's opening two gameweeks — enough to suggest the managers who own him expect him to contribute, not just to make up the numbers. That makes this a genuine early differential, not an enabler play. It's also worth noting that in Gameweek 2 itself, none of the top sample gave him the captain's armband — 0% of them did. This was a squad decision, not a pick made in hope of a big single week.
The caution from the rest of the game is easy to explain. Gvardiol fractured his tibia during City's 1-1 draw with Chelsea in January and needed surgery. He was sidelined for months, and even his own camp spent the spring managing expectations about when he'd be back — his representative said at the time that he was training daily, even in his own time in Croatia, and staying "extremely motivated," but a firm return date kept slipping. For a lot of managers building squads for a new season, a defender who missed the back half of the previous campaign with a broken leg is an easy player to leave out until he's proved it in games again.
The best-ranked managers appear to have looked past that, and two pieces of real information line up with their conviction. First, City moved this summer to hand Gvardiol a new contract running to 2033 — a five-year extension on the deal he signed after joining from RB Leipzig, with a substantial pay rise attached. Clubs don't usually hand out bumper new terms to a player they see as an injury doubt on the fringes. Second, his track record backs it up: he was one of Pep Guardiola's most reliable performers on the way to the 2023-24 title and adapted well when he was played out of position at left-back through a difficult 2024-25 season. He has a history of being trusted in more than one role, which matters now.
That versatility matters because City have a new manager. Pep Guardiola left in the summer and Enzo Maresca has taken over, and early team news had Gvardiol continuing to start at left-back regardless of the change. City's start to the season has been bumpy — they lost the Community Shield 3-0 to Arsenal and then needed a much-improved second half to beat Bournemouth 2-1, having conceded three clear chances before half-time. Gvardiol himself has said the back line is still adjusting to a system with echoes of Maresca's old Chelsea and Leicester sides. Even through that bedding-in period, he has kept his place. For managers watching team news and squad depth closely, a settled starting spot in a defence still finding its feet was worth backing even before it looked convincing.
Two gameweeks in, that trust has produced 14 points — a reasonable return for a £5.6m defender in a backline that has already been opened up more than once. It doesn't prove the elite were right for the whole season. It shows that the specific, checkable things they were relying on — his fitness, his contract security, his starting spot — have held up so far.
Bawler's own projection engine is far more guarded about what comes next. It rates Gvardiol for just 1.88 points a gameweek from here, projects him for only 39 minutes a match on average, gives him just a 3% chance of a big haul in any given week, and puts his chance of blanking at 78.3%. That model is built on his 2025/26 season — the same campaign the tibia fracture wrecked from January onward — so its picture of him is weighted by a year of missed and interrupted games rather than by what's happened since. It's a reminder that a projection built on last season's numbers can lag behind what team news and early selection are already showing.
None of this guarantees Gvardiol keeps delivering. He isn't a penalty or set-piece threat, City's defence is still adjusting to a new manager and has already shipped presentable chances in back-to-back games, and the projection engine — built from his own recent history — rates the chance of a genuinely big week at just 3%. What the ownership gap does show is that the best-ranked managers were acting on specific, real information — a contract, a recovery, a settled role — earlier and more confidently than the rest of the game. That's evidence worth taking seriously. It isn't a promise he repeats it.