At the Gameweek 2 deadline, 32.2% of the top 999 Fantasy Premier League managers had James Tarkowski in their squad. Across the other 13 million-plus teams in the game, that figure was 8.8%. A 23.4-point gap in ownership on a £6.0m Everton centre-back is one of the widest splits Bawler's elite-sample data has picked up this season, and it is worth asking what the best managers saw that the rest of the game did not.
Start with what kind of pick this is, because it changes the reading. A £6.0m price tag sits near the top of the defender market, not the bottom. Managers do not buy Tarkowski to save money and fund a forward line — they buy him because they rate the points. That makes this a genuine early differentiator the elite identified, not a budget enabler that happened to be under-owned.
The clearest mechanism is the defensive contribution points system introduced to Fantasy Premier League, which rewards defenders who rack up a high volume of tackles, blocks, clearances and interceptions in a match. Tarkowski is built for it. Fantasy Football Scout described him as "a clearance-and-block monster for years," noting the category has made him "as relevant as he's ever been in FPL," while Fantasy Football Fix flagged that only one defender in the league recorded more of these defensive actions than him last season. That is a stat casual squads rarely check when picking a defender on reputation. Managers building squads around the underlying data are far more likely to have seen it.
There is a track record behind the pick, too. Tarkowski scored 170 points in 2025/26, the fifth-highest total for any defender in the game, built on 11 clean sheets, two goals, three assists and 12 bonus points. None of that is showy. It is the kind of return that shows up in a season-long table rather than a highlights reel, which is exactly the profile a mass-market manager scrolling for a cheap defender is liable to miss and a manager running the full ownership and points data is liable to catch.
Fixtures reinforced the case going into this season. Everton were rated among the toughest defences to break down for the opening block of games, helped by facing sides still bedding in new managers early on. Add a settled David Moyes, more than a year and a half into his second spell by kick-off, and a first full season at the new Hill Dickinson Stadium, and the underlying picture for Everton's defence looked stronger than the club's wider reputation suggested. The season points figure in our data — 18 through the first two gameweeks, a big number for any defender — is consistent with that platform holding up early.
What this was not, even among the managers who owned him, was a captaincy call. In Gameweek 2 alone, just 0.3% of the top 999 gave Tarkowski the armband. That is a single gameweek's split, not a season-long habit, but it is telling on its own terms: almost nobody who owned him wanted him doubled. The elite treated this as a floor pick — a reliable source of clean sheet and defensive-action points — rather than a differential to build a gameweek around.
Bawler's projection engine, built from last season's data ahead of this campaign, backs that reading up rather than contradicting it. It has Tarkowski projected for 3.6 points per gameweek from here, with playing time essentially guaranteed at 78 minutes a match. The haul chance — the model's estimate of a big attacking return — sits at just 6.2%, while the chance of a blank is 48.4%. That is not a projection for fireworks. It is a projection for a defender who does his job quietly, most weeks, without being the headline act.
None of this promises Tarkowski keeps producing at this rate. Two gameweeks is a small sample, the projection is built on last season's numbers rather than this one, and an ownership gap only tells you where the best-performing managers in the game have already gone, not where they are guaranteed to be proven right. What the gap does show is a specific, checkable mechanism — a scoring system suited to his game, a fixture run that favoured Everton's defence, and a price the mass market judged too rich for an unglamorous centre-back. Whether that keeps paying off from here is a question the coming weeks, not this data alone, will answer.