“Stay here and they will end up building a statue in your honour. Go somewhere else, to Barcelona, to Bayern Munich, to Real Madrid, and you will be just another player. Here you can be something more."
Jurgen Klopp’s warning to Philippe Coutinho, a few months prior to the Brazilian’s club-record £142m move to Camp Nou, has been milked for all its worth over the past six years. If you weren’t aware of it at the time, the chances are you’ll have stumbled upon it countless times in the years that have followed.
Coutinho would indeed get his move to Barcelona, before a loan switch to Bayern Munich. While he would win two La Liga titles and a Copa del Rey with the former, and went even better by lifting the treble with the Bundesliga outfit, he was nothing more than a bit-part player for both.
