Things are not looking all that great for Liverpool regarding the future of Philippe Coutinho. Mundo Deportivo (h/t Daily Mail) claims that the 25-year-old would leave us in the winter window for Barcelona. The La Liga side tried to sign the former Inter Milan player in the summer but we held firm.
The report also claims that Barcelona’s representatives were watching our dire performance in the 4-1 loss against Spurs and even Jurgen Klopp was not convinced of Coutinho staying at the club.
The German seemed upset due to the result and was miffed when he was asked about the transfer of Coutinho. As quoted by the Daily Mail, he said
“I have no idea. We will see. We do not talk about things like this. Can you imagine what it would be like to say ‘yes, we have an agreement’?
“Right now, the truth is that nobody thinks about this. We do not talk about that, why should we?
“In general, as a club, we have to create a situation in which players want to be part of everything they have. At this point, we have this. Nobody thinks about January, nobody thinks about June or July.
“Everyone wants to be part of this, but there will be transfer windows and we will see what happens.”
We all know that Coutinho handed in a transfer request in the summer but we did not let him go. The Brazilian was reintegrated into the Liverpool side a month ago and has scored 4 times for us this season but was off his game in the loss against Tottenham.
Liverpool are struggling to kill teams off this season, and we had a poor defensive record last campaign as well. The problem was masked, thanks to an exceptional attack, which is just not clicking this time around.
Coutinho played a huge role in that but he seems to be in two minds now about his future, with Barcelona tracking him on a regular basis.
Should we actually fall further behind in the race for the top four, we could see Coutinho leave in the winter window for greener pastures. It is extremely difficult for any club to hold on to its top player when performances are on the wane.
This has been a horrible start to the season and things don’t look good for us at all, Klopp and the rest of the coaching staff will have to work double hard to ensure we stay in the hunt for a top four spot or the summer of 2018 could turn out to be horrible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mgXKDewDrY