Over the last three weeks Bruno Fernandes has gone straight from being ‘red-flagged’ to that most suspect of Fantasy Football terms – ‘essential’. The wider FPL market has apparently decided that, along with Haaland and Gabriel, the Manchester United talisman is a player no team should be without – and to judge from the message boards, after three successive blanks, a growing number are not so convinced about Haaland either.
There is, I suppose, a narrative that the flood of new Bruno owners are only doing what was widely seen as the sensible approach a few weeks back: let’s wait to see where the new manager plays him and how he and the team do against Manchester City and Arsenal – and, if we see any signs of promise, we pile in. And, for sure, the successive wins against the top two in the Premiership duly met that criteria.
Yet Bruno being the top transfer-in for each of the last two gameweeks still verges on unseemly haste. Just as all the subsequent discussion about Manchester United’s nice run of fixtures, the great work done by new manager Michael Carrick – from switching tactics to inspiring new self-belief – plus the interminable references to Bruno’s much vaunted ‘multiple routes to points’ carries more than a whiff of confirmation bias.
OK, so I was among the half a million or so managers who brought him into my own team before the Arsenal game but it was hardly a ‘no-brainer’ move then and, ahead of a home game against Fulham, I am not sure it is even one now. Still I imagine plenty of the 750,000-and-counting managers who have gone on to transfer Bruno in this week may give me an argument.
It just all feels a bit bandwagonesque – even for a player who has passed the 150-point mark in each of the last five seasons, including a score of 244 in 2020/21. Yet the more interesting point now, I would argue, is the question this all begs – if Bruno truly is a ‘must-have’ and United really are a different proposition under their new manager, then which other players should we be buying to take full advantage of this transformation?
As you can see in the Herdwatch tables at end of the piece, the market has settled on Bryan Mbeumo, who is attracting some 10 times the support of fellow midfielder Matheus Cunha. Personally, I am waiting to see how United cope against a Fulham team more likely to favour defence over attack than Arsenal and City – though, if United do win big, I may have to concede there is more to the Carrick regime than has so far met my eye.
Turning to the performance of our MeanReversionMachine index, a United-less portfolio still managed a slightly above-average week on the back of some attacking defenders of its own – Van der Ven of Spurs and Liverpool’s Virgil – and decent midfield contributions from Semenyo of Manchester City and Rogers of Aston Villa. As you can see, everybody else scored two points or less – mostly less:
“The more interesting point now is the question this all begs – if Bruno truly is a 'must-have' and United really are a different proposition under their new manager, then which other players should we be buying to take full advantage of this transformation?
As for Gameweek 24, there are none of the mental contortions the portfolio’s adviser has suffered with his own team. Bruno Fernandes has simply moved from being 17.6%-owned this time last week to 25%-and-counting and, now the fourth most-owned midfielder in the game, glides into the index in place of Phil Foden, whose own star continues to plummet – at least until his next out-of-the-blue double-digit haul. That leaves the index as:
Source: Fantasy Premier League
Finishing, as ever with the Herdwatch tables of the most bought and sold players in recent weeks, let’s start with the bottom-right. Three weeks ago, in this space, an eyebrow was raised at the backward-looking and/or overly-hasty nature of a number of the moves. The resulting short-term hauls – nothing special among the buys and respectable showings from Semenyo and Timber among the sell – would appear to vindicate that view.
An even starker lesson in patience, meanwhile, is on offer in the top-left ‘buy’ table where Manchester United’s hyper-attacking defender Patrick Dorgu sits in sixth place after being transferred in by more than quarter of a million FPL players. In defence of their haste, Carrick was playing him on the left of United’s front three and he had already scored 15 points against City and eight against Arsenal. Less in their defence, that latter game saw Dorgu subbed off 10 minutes early with an apparent injury that was later confirmed as a hamstring issue.
Source: Fantasy Premier League
