Philippe Coutinho will be off the pitch for about three months, as announced by the club in a medical statement this Saturday. The player, who was operated on by surgeon Joan Carles Monllau, had arthroscopy to rebuild the external meniscus of the left knee. The fact that there was no total tear and that a complete suture of the damaged meniscus was not finally needed has helped the player to have a shorter time out than expected. Initially, if the meniscus had required a total suture, the minimum discharge time was about four months, but since in the end it has been possible to recover part of the original meniscus without the need for a complete surgery, the convalescence time is shortened by one month.
In any case, we are talking about Coutinho will not return to the pitch until the beginning of April in the best of the casess, so almost the entire LaLiga and Copa del Rey stretch will be lost, as well as the last 16 of the Champions League against PSG.
So that. Coutinho joins the list of players with long-term injuries, led by Ansu Fati, with four months off, also due to a meniscus, Gerard Piqué, with an indefinite time off because it is at the expense of how your knee evolves in the coming weeks and Sergi Roberto, who could return at the end of January after injuring the rectus femoris in his right leg.
It should be remembered that this is not Coutinho's first injury this season: he was off the pitch for almost a month due to a hamstring injury. In fact, this mishap has prevented him from reaching one hundred games with Barcelona, a figure that is surely on the minds of the club's treasurers, since it will mean the payment of 20 million in variables to Liverpool. Right now, the Brazilian forward has accumulated 90 games, so he could finish the season without reaching that figure.