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Jurgen Klopp has lifted the lid on his disappointment in Philippe Coutinho’s exit from Liverpool in 2018 - despite the Brazilian’s departure paving the way for the Reds’ subsequent success in the following years.
Coutinho had established himself as one of Liverpool’s stars by the time Barcelona came calling during the 2017/18 season, and Klopp had tried to convince him not to make the move to the Camp Nou.
"Stay here and they will end up building a statue in your honour," Klopp famously said about Coutinho. "Go somewhere else, to Barcelona, to Bayern Munich, to Real Madrid, and you will be just another player. Here you can be something more."
Coutinho ultimately wouldn’t heed that advice, and when January 2018 rolled around, he completed a £142 million (around $190M) move to Barca - a deal that held the record for a transfer involving a Premier League player until Alexander Isak’s move to Anfield this year.
After his exit from Anfield, Coutinho and Liverpool would go on to experience very different fortunes.
The forward struggled to find his feet in Catalonia, and would be sent out on loan to Bayern Munich just over a year later. Despite winning the Champions League during his time in Germany, Coutinho still couldn’t convince fans back at Barca, and the La Liga giant would end up taking a massive hit when it sold him to Aston Villa for a reported fee of £17M (around $23M).
His career never really recovered, and after a spell in Qatar with Al-Duhail, he is now back in Brazil with his boyhood club Vasco da Gama.
Liverpool, meanwhile, used the money from Coutinho’s exit to help fund moves for the likes of Alisson and Fabinho - signings that would ultimately make a huge difference as the Reds went on to win the Champions League in 2019, and the Premier League in 2020.
Despite the huge benefit that Coutinho’s sale brought for Liverpool, Klopp has insisted that he wanted to keep the Brazilian.
Speaking on the Diary Of A CEO podcast, while discussing Manchester United’s recent problems, Klopp said: "I have to plan my own life, medium and long-term, and the future of a football club. A footballer can score five goals but will not sort the problem.
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“I don't know the United problems but Liverpool was the same, on the day we sold Phil Coutinho, that's not the day I thought, 'oh, good we have the money' - I lost a player I wanted to work with for the next 10 years.
"We invested it smartly, that's true, but it's not we found the position and sorted it, we had to sort something differently, we found two players in Alisson and [Virgil] Van Dijk, that was for the future to go from there, and that's the difference I think."
Liverpool.com says: Who knows what would have happened had Liverpool managed to keep hold of Coutinho. He is the ultimate example of players who have gone on to struggle after leaving Anfield during Klopp’s reign, of which there a lot.
Whether the Reds would have had the means to go after Alisson and Fabinho the following summer is unknown, and Liverpool fans certainly won’t have any regrets about those two signings. Klopp though could have made a huge difference on Coutinho’s career.
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