Paulinho & Philippe Coutinho: Spurs and Liverpool, together at Barça

Two very different routes to the Camp Nou

Paulinho's path to Barcelona ran through Tottenham, where he arrived in the summer of 2013 as the club's transfer-record signing, and then, more surprisingly, through Guangzhou Evergrande in the Chinese Super League. His time at Spurs did not go the way anyone hoped, Paulinho himself later called it "the worst moment of my career," and he has spoken candidly about being subjected to racist abuse in Eastern Europe during that period, abuse he said nearly drove him out of the game entirely. China rebuilt him. By the time Barcelona came calling, he was a Brazil international again, and his move to Camp Nou prompted the kind of disbelief captured in his own words afterwards: "Everyone said: 'Bah, his career is over.' Now I'm at Barça. That's football."

Coutinho's route could not have been more different, at least at first. A Vasco da Gama academy product signed by Inter Milan at 16, he struggled for game time in Serie A and needed a loan to Espanyol before Liverpool took a punt on him in January 2013, for a modest £8.5million. What followed was a rise to genuine stardom on Merseyside: PFA Team of the Year in 2015, back-to-back Liverpool Fans' and Players' Player of the Season awards, the "Little Magician" nickname, and comparisons to Ronaldinho and Alessandro Del Piero from managers who worked with him. When Barcelona finally got their man in January 2018, after a saga that had run for the best part of a year, it was as one of the Premier League's most coveted creative talents.

The season itself

That is what makes the overlap so jarring. Tottenham's much-maligned record buy and Liverpool's beloved playmaker, sharing a Barcelona dressing room in 2017-18, a campaign in which the club won La Liga and the Copa del Rey. Two players whose names, in English football memory, are stapled to entirely different clubs and entirely different reputations, briefly occupying the same space in the same shirt.

What came after

Neither man's Barcelona stay defined the rest of his career in the way his time at Spurs or Liverpool did. Paulinho would leave again for China before eventually returning to Corinthians, the Brazilian club he'd left for Tottenham back in 2013, a full-circle move that culminated in an emotional, tearful interview as he revived his career in his mid-thirties, even after an ACL injury threatened to end it. Coutinho, by contrast, found Barcelona a harder fit long-term; he was loaned to Bayern Munich for the 2019-20 season, scored twice against his parent club in that infamous 8-2 Champions League quarter-final, and won the treble before later moves to Aston Villa and, eventually, back to Vasco da Gama, the boyhood club where it all began.

Both stories, in their own ways, are about survival, a player written off finding his way back, and a wonderkid discovering that not every move works out as planned. For one season, though, before either of those later chapters were written, they were teammates.