BARCELONA – Philippe Coutinho he continues his recovery plan in Sao Paulo and remains outside the efforts that Barcelona maintains, with which he has two more seasons left on his contract and which, it is suspected at the Camp Nou, will not offer facilities to find a way out to despite not entering into the sports plans of the entity.
Sources from the Barça club consulted by ESPN Deportes admitted a certain “concern” with the Brazilian footballer, whose high salary and low contribution make his transfer difficult.
Headline at the beginning of the last year, encouraged and sponsored by Ronald Koeman, the tear of the external meniscus of his left knee that he suffered on December 30, 2020 during a game against Eibar broke a regularity that had already suffered a first break in October for some discomfort in the thigh.
Participant in 14 of the 17 games in which he was available until then, ten of them as a starter, Coutinho seemed on the way to recover his best feelings … Until everything was blown up and he returned to an invisibility that with the passage of the months made him expendable first and then discarded.
If a recovery period of between three and four months was expected in January, the player’s knee did not respond as expected, at the end of March, after consulting in Qatar, he traveled to his country and tired of the problems he resolved to return to the operating room , putting himself in the hands of the doctors of the Brazilian team to solve the case.
Operated on April 5, there was talk of a loss of another three months, so now he would be in the final stretch of his recovery … But nobody is waiting for him in Barcelona.
Barça today understands that it is “necessary” to find a destination for him in the coming weeks to reduce the salary mass of the squad, which in the case of the Brazilian player means an annual gross expense of more than 20 million euros.
Lacking just over 40 million euros from his signing, the Barça club would be more than satisfied to cover that amount with a transfer … Although he suspects that it is very difficult that any club could achieve these claims and even more so taking into account the salary of the footballer, not willing to lose purchasing power away from the Camp Nou.
Coutinho “maintains a good poster in England”, he maintains himself in Barça, having evidence of a certain interest, indirectly and through representatives, of clubs such as Arsenal, Everton or Leicester who would be willing to negotiate a deal with the Barcelona entity, knowing also that the footballer himself is interested in a return to the Premier League.
Finding a point of agreement between the player, the interested club and Barcelona is a priority at the Camp Nou, where impatience grows to solve a case that has been on stage for too long.