He's Jose Mourinho's third-most-expensive signing ever, but already the Portuguese doesn't trust his big summer signing to play. How did it come to this?
He will take the field at Old Trafford on Saturday. He always does. He is a fixture, a larger-than-life figure who invariably cheers up some of the Manchester United faithful.
Enough about Fred the Red, though. His namesake, on the other hand, may not be seen – and not just because his 5ft 7in frame means he’s a Lilliputian figure in Jose Mourinho’s supersized midfield mix.
Perhaps that’s why he was overlooked two weeks ago. Mourinho’s Manchester derby gameplan was ruined, he suggested, by Paul Pogba’s injury. He was forced, he said, to start with his preferred super-sub and on-field mascot, even though “[Marouane] Fellaini was not in the condition to play for 90 minutes. I can imagine when the result was 2-1 to bring on a fresh Fellaini, I think they would be in big, big trouble.”
No doubt Pep Guardiola is still breathing a sigh of relief that the Belgian didn’t lumber on to wreak havoc in the final 15 minutes.
Woe is him
If Mourinho spun a tale of misfortune – coupled with the sacrificial nature of a semi-fit Fellaini – to subject himself to a meeting with the league leaders in a feat of doomed heroism, it was also a selective interpretation of events. It ignored United’s biggest summer signing, the man he did not select: Fred.
Fellaini could have been saved for the closing salvoes had Mourinho picked the £52 million man. Instead, he effectively confirmed that United’s biggest summer signing is now the fifth-choice central midfielder – behind not just Pogba and Fellaini, but also Nemanja Matic and Ander Herrera, who both started to very little effect at the Etihad Stadium.
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It was a game when both sides were without a £50 million-plus midfielder: Manchester City flourished without the injured Kevin De Bruyne while United floundered without the omitted Fred. That isn’t to declare that the outcome would have been different with him; more to highlight Mourinho’s vote of no confidence in the third-biggest signing he has ever made.
If, encouraged by Mourinho, the attention has been on the players he did not buy – the elusive centre-backs who could have stopped his self-fulfilling prophecy of undermined defenders conceding goals – perhaps it ought to be on those he did recruit.
Left out
With the obvious exception of Tottenham and their famous failure to buy, each of United’s peers is being given impetus by a flagship summer signing. Jorginho has helped revolutionise Chelsea’s style of play and Alisson has played his part in transforming Liverpool’s defensive record. Lucas Torreira has provided what Arsenal long lacked. Riyad Mahrez, averaging a goal or an assist every 86 minutes in the Premier League and Champions League this season, has made Manchester City still more potent.
And then there’s Fred, Old Trafford’s prosaically-named Brazilian enigma. He is the first Fred to score for United since Freddie Goodwin which, besides being a piece of trivia, ought to illustrate the mixed nature of his brief United career.
The 25-year-old has not been a constant disappointment. He got one goal and came close to another against Wolves. He played genuinely well in what was arguably United’s best performance of the campaign against Everton. He got the hook within an hour of the next match at Bournemouth when one reporter overreacted by trying, and failing, to give him 0 out of 10 in his player ratings. He hasn’t featured since.
But United are yet to define what Fred is. His former Shakhtar Donetsk manager Paulo Fonseca said his best position is as the more attacking of two central midfield players, breaking to join the forwards. If the numbers indicate his attacking intent – only Pogba, Romelu Lukaku and Anthony Martial average more shots per game – the reality is that Mourinho has never started Fred in a midfield duo.
If that betrays a lack of trust, so did the choice of Andreas Pereira to anchor the midfield when Matic was unavailable at the beginning of the campaign. Fred, it seems, is not Mourinho’s idea of an alternative to the seemingly undroppable Serb.
Master of none
Perhaps his former suitors from Manchester City muddied the waters. Guardiola targeted Fred in January, and then Jorginho in the summer, to be Fernandinho’s understudy and long-term successor. And perhaps, in an essentially constructive side, he would have been suited to the deeper role.
Instead, he looks a passer in what is not always a side configured to pass – Fellaini has other attributes, Matic can be too slow to move the ball, Mourinho’s age-old emphasis has been on counter-attacking and positioning, not possession – and a technical player in what is, as their heights show, a physical midfield. Tellingly, the four players Fred finds most with the ball are Pogba, Luke Shaw, Juan Mata and Jesse Lingard; this is not safety-first sideways distribution. Rather, he has tended to look forward and for like-minded players.
But a man granted just 69 minutes in the Champions League has tended to look on from the benches. It means the strategy behind his signing – and perhaps it is giving United too much credit to even suggest they have a strategy – would be interesting.
Perhaps he was not a Mourinho buy. Certainly, as with Alexis Sanchez, he seems to have been bought for the supposed coup of stopping City getting him, oblivious to the reality that the champions’ interest in Fred had cooled. At some stage, United may learn that City’s shortlist consists of players designed to suit Guardiola, not Mourinho.
In the meantime, it leaves Fred looking like United’s second expensive example of failed one-upmanship, miscast because of a policy of gazumping their neighbours, amid questions of what they actually signed. Fonseca may be biased, but he is also an expert witness. He said in July: “Fred will be one of the best in the world in his position. He’s a unique player.”
Yet now that unique player seems to be United’s fifth-choice midfielder. Unless, of course, he is overtaken by Scott McTominay.
Richard Jolly also writes for the National, the Guardian, the Observer, the Straits Times, the Independent, Sporting Life, Football 365 and the Blizzard. He has written for the FourFourTwo website since 2018 and for the magazine in the 1990s and the 2020s, but not in between. He has covered 1500+ games and remembers a disturbing number of the 0-0 draws.
