In the summer of 2017, Paris Saint-Germain activated the release clause in Neymar’s Barcelona
contract, paying £199.8m to sign the Brazilian. It would have a widely-felt butterfly effect
on European football, and one of the careers it changed was that of Liverpool’s Philippe Coutinho.
In 2017, Coutinho was one of the most desired attacking midfielders in the game.
One vast transfer and several years later, however,
he’s become one of the sport’s best-paid fringe players;
a gifted playmaker who nobody seems to want. So, what happened?
At the end of the 2016-17 season, Coutinho had completed a highly successful year at Liverpool.
He had been the club’s joint top-scorer in the Premier League, nobody had provided more assists,
and he was proving highly effective from the front left side of Jurgen Klopp’s 4-3-3.
Barcelona were paying attention – and so began a long-running saga, which would eventually
culminate in Coutinho moving to Camp Nou the following January for an astonishing £121.5m,
the most a British club had ever received for a player.
It was a fee with a context.
Politically, Neymar’s departure left then-Barca president Josep Bartomeu
with the need for a win in the transfer market to appease the club’s socios. But economically,
it also left Barcelona exposed to selling clubs who knew exactly how deep their pockets now were.
Coutinho’s troublesome fee was a symptom of that.
Another £121.5m, this time spent on Borussia Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembele, would be another.
Barcelona’s first-team picture was also changing, though. Xavi Hernandez had left in 2015,
Andres Iniesta was twelve months away from departing for Japan,
and the year before Neymar was unwillingly sold, Dani Alves had been allowed to join
Juventus on a free-transfer. The 2016-17 season had also been disappointing.
Barcelona finished second in the league and, despite their miraculous comeback against PSG,
would be easily dispatched in the quarter-finals of the Champions League by Juventus.
In addition to which, the final part of the season played out with the
knowledge that head-coach Luis Enrique would be leaving his job that summer,
with Athletic Club’s Ernesto Valverde becoming his successor.
So, the Barcelona that Coutinho joined was in transition.
The personnel within the side was changing, but so too was the team’s shape.
While Enrique had played a Cruyffian 4-3-3, Valverde preferred a more reserved 4-4-2,
with a more balanced, more pragmatic and less popular playing style.
It seems representative of the kind of disjointed thinking that
would increasingly characterise Bartomeu’s presidential era:
Barcelona were looking to replace Neymar and Iniesta with Coutinho, who was really comparable
to neither, and who had been at his best in a formation that the club were no longer using.
Nevertheless, his first six months were largely positive. From the right of Valverde’s four-man
midfield, he was arguably one of the club’s better players through the second half of the season.
Ironically, it would be during Coutinho’s second season and after Valverde’s change
to an ostensibly preferrable 4-3-3 that the difficulties begin. In the new shape, Coutinho
was used on the left of the front-three, his old Liverpool role, but with important differences.
The first, obviously, was the unhelpful comparison to Neymar. The second – and more significant – was
having to play from out-to-in, from an outside channel dominated by Jordi Alba overlapping runs,
to more central areas, within which Coutinho was never really a complement to Lionel Messi’s
roaming, all powerful role. At times, he even seemed to get in the way, unable to adapt to a
team which didn’t flow through him. On other occasions, it exposed his lack of defensive
work rate, never one of his strengths, but a weakness which hardly dampened the criticism.
The collective result was too often anonymity.
At times, Coutinho appeared to try too hard to impact games with the ball which, with a lack of
success, clearly damaged his confidence, exposing him back to the pressure of his vast transfer fee
and the general discontent over Neymar’s departure and the club’s recruiting strategy as a whole.
Coping with pressure and scrutiny would be a common theme. It’s also worth remembering that
Coutinho’s most successful spell, his time at Liverpool, began with a cut-price £8.5m
move from Inter Milan, after his career in Italy, which had failed to live up to lofty expectation,
had drifted off-course and through a spell on-loan at Espanyol.
The circumstances around his move to Barcelona were obviously different. So too was his response.
The 2018-19 season would be Coutinho’s last as anything like a first-team regular at Barcelona.
The following year, Valverde would lose his job mid-season and be replaced by Quique Setien,
who would oversee that disastrous exit to Liverpool in the Champions League semi-final.
Coutinho was long gone by then, though, having been loaned to Bayern Munich. There was to be
little in the way of a resurgence, though. Again, he started well, earning a place in the team ahead
of Thomas Muller, who was engaged in a public disagreement with short-lived head-coach Niko
Kovac. But when Kovac departed in November 2019, he would be replaced by Hansi Flick,
who moved the side to a 4-2-3-1, restored Muller to the role behind Robert Lewandowski
and had little use for Coutinho in anything other than a reserve or secondary role.
Flick’s demands for a high-pressing style hardly suited him, either.
As in Spain, Coutinho was partly a victim of circumstance, but he also seemed to suffer
from being lumbered with expectation or big billing. On completing the signing, Bayern
sporting director Hasan Salihamadzic described him as “a world class player with great ability.”
By February of 2020, though, then-Chief Executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was remarking that while
Coutinho had “played well in some games, sometimes he gives the impression that he’s inhibited”
Coutinho did have notable moments in a Bayern shirt, infamously scoring twice
in their 8-2 demolition of his parent club, Barcelona, in the Champions League, but it
was little surprise that there was no attempt to make the loan permanent or to extend it.
And that left – and continues to leave – Coutinho in a strange limbo.
Despite reports of Premier League interest, no move has materialised since he returned to Spain,
and he remains a Barcelona player with two years left to run on his original contract.