Should a Premier League club move for Philippe Coutinho this transfer window?

The Champions League returns and the transfer window is open, so let us check up on one player likely to feature prominently in both realms: Bayern Munich's Philippe Coutinho.

Coutinho could play against Chelsea on Saturday and has been habitually linked with a move back to the Premier League as parent club Barcelona look to get his bloated wages off their books.

The Brazilian has always been a divisive player. At his best - when getting 13 league goals and eight assists for Liverpool in 2016-17 - he is a nimble-footed, dexterous attacker who can play across the front line while possessing a cracking right-foot shot. Between 2016 and his departure in January 2018, many pundits classed Coutinho as one of the best players in England.

His critics always disputed that lofty categorisation, charging that his long-distance shooting was incredibly wasteful, that he was a player of match-winning moments rather than match-controlling influence and that he lacked the tactical understanding to operate at the highest level. In short, Coutinho was overrated. Barcelona certainly overrated him by paying a ludicrous £142 million transfer fee to Liverpool.

However, there comes a point when a player's reputation has taken such a battering that they potentially become undervalued. Coutinho, 28, was supposed to rebuild his confidence at Bayern and, while he has been a squad player for much of the season, has produced some good numbers when on the pitch.

Eight goals and six assists in 1,411 Bundesliga minutes is a ratio of midfield end product many Premier League teams could do with - Arsenal in particular. Looking at underlying metrics, Coutinho's averages 0.67 non-penalty expected goals and assists per 90 minutes of Bundesliga football - this places him behind just Thomas Muller, Serge Gnabry and Robert Lewandowski in Bayern's squad. That figure is also higher than Manchester United's Bruno Fernandes, Chelsea's Christian Pulisic and Arsenal's Nicolas Pepe.

That said, Coutinho has racked up those impressive numbers in a relatively small sample of minutes as a rotation option and back-up for Muller. It remains to be seen if he could maintain those levels as a key player in a Premier League team playing double the minutes. Moreover, it is difficult to determine how much playing for an ultra-dominant Bayern team on their way to an eighth consecutive league title inflates Coutinho's statistics. Five of his eight goals came against the bottom three, for example. As ever, Coutinho is a difficult player to evaluate.