Who are Barcelona's worst January signings

The Catalan giants' winter commercial ventures have generally been anticlimactic mediocrity at best or worse (the list below starts with mediocrity and then goes into much, much worse), with very little success. Betimate lists La Blaugrana's worst-ever January signings in the order listed below, from those you might not remember to those you will undoubtedly think of right away.

1. Philippe Coutinho

There are few sagas as absurd as Philippe Coutinho's time at the Camp Nou. When the Brazilian signed from Liverpool in January 2018, he set a new record for the most expensive player in Spanish history and paid the third-highest transfer fee in history. His form at Anfield exclusively pointed to success in Spain, therefore it should have been one of the signings of the century. Early indications showed that would be the case because Coutinho finished the 2017–18 season with seven goals and six assists. The midfielder was loaned to Bayern Munich for the following season, however, after a completely forgettable and excruciatingly miserable 2018–19 season.

Though Coutinho would go on to shine in the Bundesliga and score a brace against La Blaugrana as the Bavarian team smashed his parent club 8-2 on their way to winning the Champions League if that wasn't terrible and symbolic of sloppy operations enough. Could the Brazilians' fortunes be changing? As he returned to Camp Nou, there was a glimmer of hope, but a paltry and utterly dismal 24 La Liga appearances over the following two years steadily extinguished that small flame. One of the worst January signings in history, Coutinho cost over €140 million to acquire and was sold for only over €20 million four and a half years later.

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Coutinho is considered the worst Barca's signing

2. Matheus Fernandes

The tale of Matheus Fernandes in Barcelona was an all-encompassing disaster, ranging from the strange to the terrible. The midfielder's €7 million signing to the Spanish powerhouses was met with anticipation as he arrived from Brazilian football as a highly regarded teenager. But his Blaugrana career would not turn out as everybody had anticipated. He was immediately loaned to Real Valladolid for the remaining 2019–20 season, where he played for the club for just 17 minutes before being released a year and a half later. The Brazilian was forced to depart more than for disciplinary or footballing reasons as Barcelona looked for money to keep Lionel Messi at the club.

The athlete eventually came out and denounced the abuse he'd received from the Catalan giants, adding insult to injury to the full and total waste of millions of euros. a salty saga, to put it mildly.

Cules consider Matheus fernandes a disaster 

3. Kevin-Prince Boateng

The signing of Braithwaite may not have been as odd as the arrival of Kevin-Prince Boateng in the middle of the 2018–19 season. After Munir left for Sevilla, the former Tottenham and Portsmouth midfielder was brought in to serve as Luis Suarez's backup. He only played four times for the club, failing to score but managing one booking, thus his skills weren't really needed. But he did become the first Ghanaian to play for the team.

In the end, it was the kind of bizarre transaction that typified the unrest off the field that has come to characterize recent years at Camp Nou; it must have been divine intervention for the club to not exercise the €8 million option to purchase as part of this specific loan arrangement.

Kevin-Prnce Boateng was a strange Barca's signing