Kevin De Bruyne is Manchester City’s greatest ever player. Erling Haaland will hoover up the club’s goalscoring records; or those he does not already possess, anyway. Bernardo Silva made the most appearances of anyone for City in the last four decades, the most under Pep Guardiola and felt the manager’s favourite.
And yet perhaps the Barcelona-bound Rodri was the definitive player of Guardiola’s time at the Etihad Stadium. It helped, of course, that he scored the most momentous goal, the one that finally made City champions of Europe. Rodri against Inter in Istanbul: few supporters will ever need an explanation of that.
Rodri was a colossal figure but also a symbolic one. Guardiola’s football stemmed from the midfield and Rodri was the controller supreme, with a pass completion rate forever in the nineties and an ability to win the ball back. He was simultaneously a constructive and destructive presence. He played in Guardiola’s old position; yet he smashed through the glass ceiling for defensive midfielders.
None had won the Ballon d’Or, arguably, since Josef Masopust in 1962. Rodri did. None had ever won the World Cup’s Golden Ball. Rodri did. He arrived at the Etihad Stadium with the suspicion he may have been overpriced, having to adapt from Diego Simeone’s football to Guardiola’s, at the end of a long search for Fernandinho’s successor which had taken in midfielders as different – from each other as from him – as Fred and Jorginho.
It was testament to Guardiola’s coaching that Rodri improved far beyond what seemed possible. There were times, in his early days in City, when he looked slightly cumbersome. By the time he peaked, the stature that made him taller than the quintessential midfielders of Guardiola’s Barcelona was an asset, a sign that the Catalan had adapted to the English game by having more physical players. When City won the Champions League, they were staffed by sizeable figures: a back four comprising defenders who were centre-backs by trade, plus Rodri, plus Haaland. It was a team with the height to satisfy Tony Pulis and the technique Guardiola prized.
The eventual verdict may be that Guardiola’s City ceased to be a great team on 22 September, 2024: the day Rodri suffered his cruciate ligament injury against Arsenal. A month later, they were sent spiralling into a run of nine defeats in 12.
When, in Guardiola’s last 20 months, they threatened to revisit past glories, it was when Rodri was able to exert a huge influence. There was the week in September 2025 when they beat Manchester United and Napoli and then drew away at Arsenal; the four-game run in March and April where victories over Arsenal sandwiched ones against Liverpool and Chelsea. In 2024-25, after recovering from his knee injury, he started one game. City beat Juventus 5-2 in it.
It felt no coincidence. Rodri turned into a talismanic force. In his last 75 starts before he faced eight months out, and excluding penalty shootouts, City lost once – in the 2024 FA Cup final. Across the last three-and-a-bit years before he was ruled out, he began 149 games and City lost just 10 of those. They won the Premier League in each of those full seasons and the Champions League once. In two other European campaigns, they were eliminated once by a ridiculously late Real Madrid comeback and once on penalties.
It is worth noting those three-and-a-but years came immediately after a Champions League final that Rodri spent on the bench. And then, at 25, he took the step forward to become a defensive midfielder to rival any in Premier League history; Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira and N’Golo Kante had company at the summit of the standings.
Perhaps there is something fitting in Rodri leaving in the same summer as Guardiola, his greatest creation going with the manager. Certainly it underlines the sense an era has ended, a feeling that was compounded by City’s Community Shield demolition at Arsenal’s hands.
Financially, City have got an excellent deal from Barcelona: a fee of £65.4m for a 30-year-old who was in the last year of his contract. Yet it will cost far more to replace him and, whether Ayyoub Bouaddi, Enzo Fernandez or another, any successor will be a downgrade. City have already paid £116m for Elliot Anderson; part of the challenge for the former Nottingham Forest player is to develop the authority Rodri exuded.
The World Cup illustrated how good he is, a player capable of elevating an excellent team to another level. Barcelona, fresh from back-to-back La Liga triumphs, may hope he can be the difference-maker in the Champions League. City could look at Rodri’s total of 26 club starts last season and wonder if the World Cup-winning captain would have played often enough this year to enable them to regain the Premier League crown. But it may forever remain the case that City’s finest team, and not merely Guardiola’s best City team, came with Rodri in his prime.