10 mei 2022 – FC Barcelona seems to be saying goodbye to Philippe Coutinho next summer. The Brazilian, who came over from Liverpool in January 2018 for an astronomical amount, left for Aston Villa last winter on a rental basis. He is performing so well there that the Premier League club is said to want to buy him permanently from Barca.
FC Barcelona made several attempts in the summer of 2017 to untie Coutinho from Liverpool. But the English superpower did not want to let the Brazilian go under any circumstances at the time. A few months later, he finally got his dream transfer to Catalonia. FC Barcelona paid a sloppy 135 million euros for his arrival. An amount that could rise to 160 million euros due to bonuses. This made Coutinho the most expensive player in club history in one fell swoop. But he failed to live up to the high expectations.
In 2019 Coutinho left for Bayern Munich on a rental basis for a year. In the service of the Germans, he won the Champions League. Painful for FC Barcelona was that Coutinho scored twice on his way to the final in the historic quarter-final match against his actual employer. Coutinho returned to the Premier League with Aston Villa in January this year. He has so far played fifteen times for the number eleven in the Premier League, scoring four times and providing three assists. Excellent figures, which, in combination with his game, have made Aston Villa so enthusiastic that it wants to sign the Brazilian definitively after this season. And that is possible for a small price, namely about twenty million euros.
According to Fabrizio Romano and Gerard Romero, among others, the deal is imminent. Aston Villa has already reached an agreement with the player and is close to an agreement with FC Barcelona. So it seems that the marriage between the Catalan top club and Coutinho is finally coming to an end. He eventually wore the FC Barcelona shirt 106 times, scored 25 times and provided 14 assists. In Barcelona, Coutinho became national champion twice, he also won the Copa del Rey and once the Supercup.
