One of the most dispiriting stints for any player at any club in football history technically and officially concluded on Thursday with confirmation that, nearly four-and-a-half years after joining Barcelona for an initial £105 million fee , for a relatively paltry £15 million after excelling on loan this winter and spring.
In his time as a Barcelona player, Coutinho scored 41 times in 160 games, which doesn’t sound too bad—it’s just that only 26 of those goals were for Barcelona and two of them, notoriously, cameBarcelona for Bayern Munich in the most humiliating result in the club’s history, an 8–2 defeat in the Champions League quarterfinals in August 2020.It’s not really Coutinho’s fault. He was never what Barcelona wanted him to be.
First, Neymar was the club’s future: he was the youngest of the vaunted Lionel Messi–Luis Suárez-Neymar front line, and the assumption had been that he would, in time, come to succeed Messi as the icon of the team. Barcelona needed a young creator who could take on that mantle. And second, there was a sense of humiliation. Barcelona was supposed to be one of the world’s elite. How could it be nudged aside by a richer rival, as it had been when Real Madrid had snatched Luis Figo in 2000? All those old neuroses from the 1970s and ’80s, all the pre–Cruyff Dream Team sense of inferiority, bubbled to the surface. It had money and there seemed an imperative to spend it, to go out and blow the lot on a couple of stars to make a point .
Coutinho’s debut for Barcelona came in the Copa del Rey against Espanyol. He made a promising start: a few nice touches and a nutmeg that delighted fans desperate for a new hero. But Coutinho was neither the new Andres Iniesta nor the new Neymar, nor even really some hybrid of the two.
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