Philippe Coutinho has found a new club, and it comes with a reunion years in the making. The former Liverpool and Barcelona midfielder has joined Santos, where he'll play alongside Neymar for the first time at club level.
Coutinho had been without a team since February, when he terminated his contract with boyhood club Vasco da Gama, citing mental exhaustion as the main reason. Retirement was reportedly on the table at one point, but the 34-year-old has instead opted to keep playing, signing a deal with Santos that runs until the end of the current season in December.
Santos currently sit 10th in the Brazilian league standings and are 90 minutes away from reaching the Copa Sudamericana semifinals. At the club, Coutinho will link up again with former teammates Arthur and Gabriel Barbosa, though the headline reunion is obviously with Neymar.
Neymar's Persistence Paid Off
Coutinho was officially unveiled at Santos on Monday and used his introductory press conference to explain just how big a role Neymar played in getting him there, revealing the move had been in the works for months.
"Neymar certainly played a very important role in my coming here," Coutinho said, via ESPN. "He's a player who needs no introduction, a friend I've had since childhood, and I think he was the first person in football to send me a message when I left Vasco."
"The next day he had already sent me a message, but at that moment I said: 'Look Ney, it would be a pleasure to play with you, but I'm not feeling well right now, it's not possible' and it really didn't make sense to me. Months later he contacted me again, but my answer was the same. Then two weeks ago he sent me another message. Then I stopped, reconsidered, I wanted to go back to playing football and I thought: 'Why not?' I'm going to a big club, in another city. It would be unfair to me not being able to go back to work and not being able to go back to playing football. I wanted to thank the president [Marcelo Teixeira], Mattos and Ney. I'm happy to accept this challenge."
Neymar welcomed Coutinho to the club's training ground in a video posted on social media on Monday. After a lengthy hug, Neymar was heard saying, "If this is a dream, I don't want to wake up."
Two Careers That Kept Crossing Paths
Neymar and Coutinho, both born in 1992, came through Brazil's youth setup together, playing at the 2009 FIFA U-17 World Cup before Coutinho eventually joined Neymar in the senior national team. They were focal points of the Seleção's attack in the late 2010s, each scoring two goals as Brazil reached the quarterfinals of the 2018 World Cup.
That tournament turned out to be the last time they played together at a major international event, since an ankle injury kept Neymar out of the 2019 Copa América, which Coutinho and Brazil went on to win. The pair's final appearance together for the national team came in a friendly against South Korea in June 2022.
Their club careers ran on parallel but separate tracks. Coutinho joined Barcelona in January 2018, six months after Neymar's move to Paris Saint-Germain, arriving in Catalonia in part to help fill the gap Neymar's departure had left. That spell never really worked out, and two years later Coutinho went out on loan to Bayern Munich, where he won the Champions League in 2019-20 by beating Neymar's PSG in the final.
After unremarkable stints at Aston Villa, Al Duhail SC and Vasco da Gama, Coutinho now gets the chance he and Neymar never had: to actually play together for the same club.
