Fredrick FPL: Is He Worth Buying After The Move?
Short answer — A £4.0m Brentford defender with six lovely fixtures ahead — and my numbers say he'll score you nothing. Fredrick has just signed for Brentford, and on paper the timing looks tempting. The Bees face Aston Villa (A), Liverpool (H), Hull (A), Forest (H), Brighton (A) and Everton (H) over the next six gameweeks — a genuinely kind run for a…
Here's the problem, and it's a big one: I have no prior record of this player. No minutes, no starts, nothing to tell me what he actually does when he plays. And at Brentford, he's not walking into a team short of bodies. On my numbers there are six players ahead of him in that defensive pecking order. Ajer is my top Brentford defensive pick — a solid four points most weeks over this run at £4.5m — with Schuster, Hickey and Kayode all queued up behind him. Fredrick is behind all of them.
That's why my six-week projection for him is, bluntly, nothing. Not "modest". Nothing. He's a squad signing until he proves otherwise, and there's no set-piece angle to sweeten it either — Thiago has penalties, Lewis-Potter takes the direct free kicks, Jensen has corners.
Could this change? Of course. New signings force their way in all the time, and if he starts stacking up minutes I'll move him up fast — a £4.0m starting defender in a team with these fixtures would be one of the best enablers in the game. But you buy that player *when* he's starting, not on the hope. Right now he's a bench fossil who might never play, and £4.0m fossils cost you nothing to ignore until they show up on a team sheet.
If you want the Brentford defence — and over this run, you should want it — the answer is Ajer at £4.5m. That extra half a million buys you a player who actually clears the first hurdle: getting on the pitch.
Verdict: leave Fredrick alone. Watch the team sheets, buy Ajer if you want the fixtures, and don't spend a transfer on a name my numbers can't even find minutes for.