In Gameweek 2 alone, Haaland sat in 92.2% of the top 999 ranked squads on the game, against 68.7% of every squad in Fantasy Premier League. That is a 23.5 percentage-point gap in ownership, one of the widest of the season so far, and it sits on the most expensive asset the game has ever had.
This is not a case of a cheap squad-filler picked to free up cash for elsewhere. Haaland costs £15.5m, a record for any player in Fantasy Premier League history. Spending that much on one man reshapes an entire squad, so committing to him at close to universal rates, as the elite did, is a deliberate structural choice rather than an afterthought.
The price is a reward for last season. Haaland scored 239 points in 2025/26, more than anyone else in the game, from 27 goals and eight assists. He finished that campaign as the most-owned and most-captained player around, which is precisely why the game priced him up by £1.5m for this one.
His start to 2026/27 was quieter than that price suggests. Haaland blanked in Gameweek 1 against Bournemouth, missing a clear chance in a game where he still led all forwards for shots and chances created. The volume of chances did not turn into a score, and for a manager weighing up where a limited budget goes, a blank at a record price is a reason to pause.
Gameweek 2 gave elite squads a specific reason to hold their nerve instead. City went away to Crystal Palace, and last season City were among the best travelling sides in the division for goals scored and shots taken away from home. Palace had also just lost their opening game to Everton, which fed the idea that their defence was there to be got at.
That fixture read was not universal, though. Palace's own defensive record in 2025/26 was solid, top half of the league for goals conceded with a dozen clean sheets, so the case for a big Haaland return in Gameweek 2 was strong rather than certain. At least one independent projection model rated other options, including Bruno Fernandes, higher for the gameweek.
What stands out is that the elite did not stop at owning Haaland, they backed that ownership with the armband. 85.1% of the top 999 managers who named a captain in Gameweek 2 chose him. That figure is measured in that single gameweek, not across the season, but it shows the top of the table treating ownership and conviction as the same decision rather than two separate ones.
The average manager, working with the same £100m budget as everyone else, faces a harder trade-off. Fifteen and a half million pounds on one striker is well over a tenth of the whole squad's budget, and after a blank at that price, spreading the budget across other positions becomes a more attractive way to build a team. That is very likely a large part of why ownership across the whole game, still a clear majority at 68.7%, trailed the elite by so much.
None of this proves how Gameweek 2 actually went for Haaland, and it says nothing certain about the rest of the season. Bawler's own projection engine, built from his 2025/26 season data, currently rates him for 5.45 points a gameweek from a projected 80 minutes on the pitch. It puts his chance of a big haul at 16.0% and his chance of blanking again at 67.4%, a genuinely high-variance profile for a player carrying record ownership among the best squads in the country.
The lesson here is narrow rather than sweeping. Elite managers moving almost as one on a single player in a single gameweek is worth noting, evidence that the best squads read that fixture and Haaland's underlying threat the same way. It is not a promise about what happens next, and Haaland's own projection numbers are the clearest reminder of that.