Most first-draft advice is somebody's opinion about who you should own. This is not that. This is what the entire FPL population has already done, pulled from the game's own ownership data and refreshed every morning.
It is a different and more useful thing, because your rank is not a contest against the fixture list. It is a contest against everyone else's squad.
The template is already forming
Ownership across all 564 players, as it stands:
| Ownership band | Players |
|---|---|
| 40%+ | 4 |
| 20%+ | 17 |
| 10%+ | 45 |
| 5%+ | 75 |
| Under 1% | 371 |
Four players are already in more than 40% of squads, and 371 of the 564 in the game are in fewer than one in a hundred. A useful sanity check on the data: total ownership across every player sums to almost exactly 1,500% — fifteen squad slots per manager, which is what it should be.
The four everyone owns
| Player | Pos | Club | Price | Ownership |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Erling Haaland | FWD | Man City | £15.5m | 75.1% |
| João Pedro | FWD | Chelsea | £7.5m | 54.6% |
| Bruno Fernandes | MID | Man Utd | £12.0m | 48.7% |
| Dominik Szoboszlai | MID | Liverpool | £7.0m | 48.2% |
Haaland at 75.1% is the defining decision of the draft. At £15.5m he is 15.5% of your entire budget, and three in four managers have concluded that is worth paying. Not owning him is a position you take deliberately, and it is a large one: on any week he hauls, you lose ground to three-quarters of the game.
Szoboszlai at 48.2% is the more interesting number. He is £7.0m, and the reason he is there is Mohamed Salah's departure — Liverpool's penalty duty and set pieces are up for reallocation, and the market has decided he inherits them. That is a bet on a role, not on established output, and the market has grown more confident in it: he has climbed nearly six points of ownership in the past week alone.
Manchester City are two slots of your squad
Adding up ownership by club shows where the money is going:
| Club | Total ownership across squad | Players above 10% |
|---|---|---|
| Man City | 212.8% | 6 |
| Arsenal | 156.3% | 7 |
| Man Utd | 151.4% | 5 |
| Chelsea | 144.3% | 4 |
| Spurs | 127.9% | 4 |
| Liverpool | 115.8% | 4 |
212.8% means the average squad holds more than two Manchester City players. With Haaland at £15.5m plus Guéhi, O'Reilly, Semenyo and Elliot Anderson all above 10% ownership, City are absorbing a large share of the game's budget and a large share of its risk. A bad month for them is a bad month for most of the field — which cuts both ways, and is exactly the sort of correlated exposure worth being deliberate about.
The most-owned by position
Goalkeepers. David Raya (£6.0m, 30.4%) leads, with Martin Dubravka (£4.0m, 24.8%) the budget pick. Senne Lammens (£5.0m, 20.2%) is the third keeper above 20%, and Bart Verbruggen sits at £4.5m and 16.7%.
Defenders. The most crowded position in the game, and the tightest: Gabriel (£8.0m, 25.7%), Luke Shaw (£4.5m, 24.3%), Marc Guéhi (£6.0m, 24.2%), Pedro Porro (£5.5m, 23.9%) and Nico O'Reilly (£6.5m, 23.1%) are separated by 2.6 percentage points. Note two £4.0m defenders with real ownership: Diop at Ipswich (20.1%) and van Ewijk at Coventry (16.8%) — the cheapest way to fund the top end, and a bet on promoted sides keeping clean sheets.
Midfielders. Bruno (48.7%) and Szoboszlai (48.2%) are now effectively level, then a gap to Morgan Rogers (£7.5m, 31.6%) after his £117m move to Chelsea.
Forwards. Haaland (75.1%) and João Pedro (54.6%), then a long drop to Brian Brobbey at Sunderland (£6.0m, 21.7%) and Dominic Calvert-Lewin at Leeds (£6.0m, 18.1%) — both on penalties, both at the budget end.
What ownership does and doesn't tell you
It tells you what the field owns. It does not tell you what will score.
Pre-season ownership is particularly unreliable as a signal, for a reason worth naming: it is largely built from last season's points table and the transfer window's headlines, before a single minute has been played under eight new managers. The crowd is not forecasting. It is extrapolating, and it is doing so at a moment when a lot of the underlying assumptions have changed.
What ownership is genuinely good for is understanding your own exposure. Owning a 74% player is not an edge; it is insurance against falling behind. Owning a 5% player who returns is where rank is actually made. Both are legitimate — they are just different bets, and it helps to know which one you are making.
Do it with the tools
- Trends — the differential finder plots ownership against production, so you can see who is delivering that the field hasn't noticed.
- Assistant Manager — builds the best legal £100.0m squad against our expected-points model rather than against the crowd. Comparing its output with the template above is a fast way to find where consensus and model disagree.
- Drafts — save a squad, plan transfers forward, and see what each plan costs.
Ownership figures here are pulled from the live game and refreshed daily, so the numbers on this page move. Named percentages were current when this was published; the Player Explorer always has today's.
Part of the FPL 2026/27 pre-season guide.