FPL Gameweek 4 Review: What Went Right And Wrong

GW4 Autopsy: The Week the Template Held the Line

Pascal Groß, owned by about 2 in 10 of us, put up 17 points — the biggest haul of the gameweek and, in hindsight, the armband nobody gave him. That was the week in a nutshell: the average manager scored 69, the top score hit 151, and the distance between those two numbers was made almost entirely of players most of us don't own.

Look down the haul list and it reads like a differential hunter's fever dream. Schade banged in 15 for Brentford with barely half of 1 in 10 managers on board. Bogle matched him for Leeds at 3 in 100. Davis of Ipswich and Hull's Belloumi went for 14 and 13 respectively, both owned by almost nobody. Dunk's 12 came from fewer than 2 in 100 squads. If you had two or three of those, you flew.

But here's the part we should hold onto before anyone panics and starts chasing: the template did its job too. Raya's 14 points landed in about 4 in 10 teams. João Pedro's 12 went to roughly 7 or 8 in 10 of us. Those hauls didn't move your rank — they protected it. That's what template players are for. When João Pedro scores, the whole flock rises together, and nobody gets left behind. Owning what everyone owns isn't a failure of imagination; it's insurance, and this week the insurance paid out.

The captaincy is the honest sore spot. More than 7 in 10 of us handed Haaland the armband, and the best call in hindsight was Groß — an 18.6%-owned Brighton midfielder. That will happen some weeks. It does not mean the crowd was wrong to back the most reliable captain in the game; it means one week's hindsight is not a strategy. If you tore up your captaincy plan every time a differential outscored the obvious pick, you'd be broke by October.

So, the lesson — and the one move before the next deadline. If you're tempted to chase Schade or Bogle off a single haul, we'd urge patience: one big week from a low-owned player is a story, not a trend. The exception is Groß. Seventeen points, a fifth of the game already on him, and momentum toward becoming template himself — he's the one differential here worth taking seriously before he stops being one.

Our call: protect your Raya and João Pedro, keep the armband on the obvious pick, and if you make one move this week, make it Groß — get there before everyone else does.