We really dodged a bullet with Fred.
No, Fred is just the perfect example of what happens when a good player goes to a terrible club.
We saw Fred was quality when he played against us, we know pretty reliably Pep was interested. What's happened is he went to a club who played the wrong type of football, had his confidence almost systematically eroded to rock bottom by a manager who didn't want him, lost the support of the fans, and now gets sent out to play a game every few weeks in a calamity of a team with no tactical instruction.
If we bought him he'd be back to his Shakhtar level in 6 weeks.