Replacements for £6.4m injury-hit Benjamin Mendy, Man City’s star defender

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With the news that Manchester City’s flying Left Back, Ben Mendy, is on the sidelines probably for close to 2 months after knee surgery in Barcelona yesterday ..

.. this gives a headache for many FPL managers who have the popular defender in their squad. Mendy is currently owned by 18.8% of managers which means he’s in about 1.1 million teams! There is plenty of time to make your mind up due to the International Break but don’t leave it for too long if you’re going to be close to your squad budget with your wished-for transfer in.

The fiso community has already been giving the transfer conundrum some thought and below we cover their and our main suggestions to replace the effervescent Mendy.

A Liverpool Defender

Liverpool have been much improved defensively this season and Robinson (£6.4m/31.6%/71pts), Gomez (£5.1m/4.2%/46pts), van Dijk (£6.0m/16.5%/51pts) and Alexander-Arnold (£5.0m/18.5%/51pts) have all produced bountiful returns and all are at or less than Mendy’s £6.4m cost. Liverpool’s fixtures look reasonable although their only home match in the next 4 is the local derby against Everton.

Another Man City Defender

Laporte (£5.9m/11.9%/58pts) has been the stand-out value defender for Man City, followed by Walker (£6.5m/13.1%/54pts). It’s not clear who will replace Mendy at Left Back – perhaps Delph (£5.3m/0.2%/15pts) or Danilo (£5.1m/0.3%/0pts) or the two of them rotating? So a safer bet would be to go with Laporte who should not suffer from much rotation or a defender from another club.

A Form Defender

Rather than the above two options, you could look at diversifying. Nearly half the teams already have the most expensive defender Alonso who is £0.7m more than Mendy so other options could be:

Brighton’s Dunk (£4.4m/2.9%/40pts) with good fixtures coming up and the low cost freeing up funds to strengthen elsewhere in your squad;

Leicester’s Chilwell (£5.1m/2.5%/44pts) again with a good run of fixtures to look forward to;

Newcastle’s Yedlin (£4.5m/1.4%/35pts) who now that the Magpies might have turned the corner have some reasonable fixtures coming up;

Everton’s Digne (£4.8m/1.8%/33pts) who will have two good home fixtures sandwiched in between the derby with Liverpool.

Looking at the number of ‘transfers in’ this gameweek, not surprisingly the Liverpool players Robertson and Alexander-Arnold top the stats followed by Laporte. Then comes Dunk and the popular Doherty (£4.9m/16.5%/54pts) who is definitely one to consider if you don’t already have him given his ability to get forward into scoring positions and Wolves’ promising results.