5 factors that could help Philippe Coutinho rediscover his best form

#3 Services of a psychologist

Coutinho's struggles could be emotional

While a lot of attention is being drawn to Coutinho’s physical struggles on the field of play, not much attention is being given to his emotional state and this could very well be where the problem lies.

Football is very much a physical game as it is mental, with the state of a player’s mind being as important if not more so as his physical condition, with the saying ‘the game is first won in the mind before the field’ holding true.

Players’ struggle with emotional health is more rampant than you might think, with a report indicating that an ever increasing number of professional footballers deal with emotional and psychological trauma, most of which go untreated.

Barcelona themselves have been in a scenario like that in recent years, as the much-loathed Andre Gomes revealed that he was dealing with tremendous emotional distress, likening his struggles to kind of a hell, which unsurprisingly affected his performances on the field of play.

Coutinho is the most expensive player in the history of Barcelona and that in itself is enough pressure, coupled with the immense demands of performing at an optimum on a weekly basis at a club the size of Barca might prove too much for anyone to handle.

The drop in performance levels and going from a player confident in his own abilities to one who is afraid of taking risks and making mistakes is too drastic and could be indicative of an underlying problem which could be emotional.

The club could employ the services of a psychologist to help Coutinho deal with the tremendous pressures associated with being a modern-day footballer. After all, he is very much human - susceptible to the same caprices as the rest of us.