Goodbye, Philippe Coutinho, and good luck
Seven months, one transfer request, two fake injuries, £142 million and what should (but will not) be a lifetime’s worth of stupid nonsense later, Philippe Coutinho is a Barcelona player. Wasn’t that fun? No, obviously. It was terrible.
But now it’s over, and so we must reflect. The headline, as always, will be the price, either the second or third largest transfer fee ever, depending on whether you count PSG’s very illegal-seeming loan-to-buy deal for Kylian Mbappe yet.
The fee is huge, but as Jose Mourinho pointed out in reference to Liverpool’s recent signing of Virgil van Dijk, if a club want a player, they can either pay what’s being asked, or they can find someone else.
To focus on the fees themselves is to mistake a symptom for the disease, which is that the various governing bodies of the sport have failed, in any meaningful way, to regulate, well, anything. Clubs can do whatever they can afford to do, and the rich are getting richer.
The more disturbing, though not unrelated, trend is how protracted and generally miserable the modern day transfer saga has become, and the fact this particular brand of protracted misery now feels like a necessary, accepted part of doing business. Before it was Coutinho it was van Dijk, and before it was van Dijk it was Dembele and before it was Dembele it was Neymar and before it was Neymar it was Sterling and before it was Sterling it was Suarez and so on and so on and so on.
The players tend to get the brunt of the criticism for this state of affairs — loyalty’s a vicious mistress — but it’s hard to know who to blame, really. The players are doing only what they think will allow them to get the most out of what is a fleetingly short career. The clubs are doing only what has been done to them by other, bigger clubs (and as PSG made clear this summer, there is always a bigger club).
The agents are often portrayed as the architects of it all, and while they’re probably the most likely to be as awful as they seem, they’re only exploiting loopholes more powerful bodies have allowed to stay open, presumably because their being open has allowed all of them — the agents, the clubs, the players, the administrators — to become very, very rich.
This, it seems, is what it looks like when everyone is allowed to do whatever they want, and so they do it gleefully, without any regard for the consequences, and we are left with a mess that is too big to clean up because it was not caused by any single decision but by a very long series of non-decisions that have combined to create something much, much worse.
And so the overriding emotion in the wake of Coutinho’s departure is, what, exhaustion? Or perhaps there is simply a void where 10, even five years ago, emotions would have been, a numbness, the physical equivalent of what happens when you stare at a single word for too long, a kind of mental untethering. It’s hard to know what any of it means anymore. Is it good? Is it bad? Or is this so overwhelmingly the way things are, good and bad have lost any former sense? It is, in a word, sad.
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And all of it is made sadder because it only serves to obscure the fact Philippe Coutinho is such a fabulous, joyful player. In a sport that is increasingly dominated by the fast and the strong and the versatile, Coutinho impresses upon you the beauty of the game. To watch him, over the past five years, grow into his talent, add some end product to his extraordinary technical skill, has been a pleasure. And yet his genius, his sheer grace on the ball, has always been of that exceedingly rare variety that makes you wonder whether end product was ever worth caring about in the first place.
And so, miserable as this entire process has been, as terrible as it has made everyone look, good for Coutinho. He gets his dream move, and Barca, a club who have always prided themselves on style as much as substance, are a fitting destination for a truly stylish player, even if the current side fall some way short of their own Cruyffian ideals.
As for Liverpool, they’re in a much better position to withstand Coutinho’s departure than they were that of Luis Suarez. Indeed, perhaps Jurgen Klopp’s biggest achievement in his three years at Anfield has been ensuring, for the first time in a decade, the Reds aren’t over-reliant on a single player.
Still, he will be missed. Of course he will be missed. These have been lean years for Liverpool, but Coutinho has been a near-constant source of inspiration, of creativity and flair, of fun. Beneath the many layers of anger many Reds feel toward him right now is, I hope, the knowledge he was special, and that Anfield was a better place for having him around.