Speaking to Pep Guardiola earlier this year about Rodri, it is fair to say that he was not expecting this. “If holding midfielders started getting the recognition of Erling Haaland and Kevin [De Bruyne], we would have a problem,” Guardiola told Sky Sports.
“The holding midfielder has to never, ever be in the highlights. The holding midfielder has to think for the rest of the team and not expect the recognition. Without him, we could not do what we are doing. But the highlights have to belong to other people.”
A conversation with Bernardo Silva in the summer also comes to mind. The ultimate team man himself, he hinted at his contempt for these individual trinkets. Not for him the claim of Trent Alexander-Arnold that the Ballon d’Or is the prize he most craves.
“I give those awards just the right amount of importance they deserve,” he told Sky Sports, leaving little doubt as to his view. “We are playing a collective sport but the individual awards always go to the strikers because they have the last touch,” he added.
“But if you understand the game, people inside the game, either player or manager, know how important it is to have a proper goalkeeper, proper defender, proper midfielder and proper striker, not just a proper striker. Strikers do not win titles alone.
“Look at the teams that win titles. The base comes from a very good defence. If you defend well, you will attack better. So when I look at individual awards and see only the guys who score goals winning, I feel a bit like it does not represent our sport that well.”
And yet, here we are. Rodri. Ballon d’Or winner. In truth, he was arguably even better in the previous season, instrumental in Manchester City’s historic treble and scoring the winning goal in the Champions League final. But glory with Spain changed everything.
Named as the best player at Euro 2024, it feels part of a belated realisation that this is the man responsible for getting the best teams playing – at club and international level. Goals still attract our attention. But Rodri is such a presence that he is hard to ignore.
Picture City in possession and you will picture Rodri, spraying it left and right, the ball rarely more than a few passes away from returning to its rightful spot at his feet. He had over 4000 touches of the football in the Premier League last season. It was a record.
His metronomic use of the ball makes the game look easy. It is not. He receives passes under such pressure that a lesser player would be horrified to be expected to do anything whatsoever with it. He holds off his marker, drops a shoulder and strolls away.
There are numbers for everything in football now and some of them help to articulate what the eye can see. There were 2068 of Rodri’s passes last season that were played while under pressure, 500 more than the next man on the list. He works in tight spaces.
And yet, he seldom surrenders the ball. Tracking data allows us to calculate how difficult the passes that players attempt are based on the location of the opposition. It might seem as if Rodri’s passes are simple but there are so many he should lose it a lot.
Instead, the data tells us that of the 119 players to make over 1000 passes in the Premier League last season, Rodri had the highest pass completion above what would have been expected of those passes – 6.79 percentage points higher.
His passing is more ambitious than he makes it look. He ranked among the top five players in the Premier League for line-breaking passes. Alongside those playmakers Martin Odegaard and the risk-taking Bruno Fernandes, there was Rodri, probing away.
And he was working in an extra dimension to everyone else. The number of chipped passes being so much higher than any other player might seem just a stylistic quirk but it is revealing in its own way. Rodri can go between or over. Every club in the bag.
For those who prefer their statistics slightly more consequential, there were also eight goals and nine assists in City’s Premier League title-winning campaign. Only five players in the competition could better him on both counts and all of them were forwards.
Rodri brings more, of course. Much more. No Premier League player won possession of the ball more times in the middle of the pitch and that ability to snuff out the counter-attacks helps to explain why City were so alarmed when he suffered his serious injury.
“Internally, all team-mates and staff, they all know how important and decisive he is,” said Guardiola. “Massively important for us. With him we are a better team. No doubt. The amount of things that he helps to do, he is irreplaceable right now, I would say.”
That is how it seemed for a while. In the six games that City played against Premier League opposition without Rodri last season, they lost to everyone except Luton. They were unbeaten in the 49 with him until being denied the double in the FA Cup final.
There followed that special summer with Spain but this award is bitter-sweet in that it arrives with him injured. A banner was unveiled at the Etihad Stadium for the Inter game in September that read, ‘Can we talk about Rodri?’ Four days later, the leg gave way.
But he is in the spotlight again now. His manager and his team-mates can only smile as the holding midfielder supposed to operate in the shadows receives the award supposedly reserved for the glory guys. Finally, the football world is talking about Rodri.