Pep Guardiola will have to reinvent Manchester City without Rodri
The main threat to Vini Jr. in the Ballon d’Or, the midfielder is the brains of the team, and a serious injury has become the coach’s main recent challenge. City’s performance without the athlete drops drastically; see
With the serious injury suffered by Rodri, which, according to the English press, should keep the player out of the rest of the Manchester City season , Pep Guardiola will face his biggest challenge in recent years.
Recognized for influencing a generation of coaches with his innovations in football, the coach will need to use, once again, his brilliance to create alternatives to the loss of an athlete who can be considered the brain of the team.
Even though he plays as a defensive midfielder, Rodri is not the main threat to Vini Jr. for the 2024 Ballon d’Or award for nothing. The difference in the team’s recent performance with and without the player illustrates this. Since the start of the 2020/21 season, Manchester City have had a 79.1% success rate with Rodri. Without him, the number drops to 66.6%.
The Spanish midfielder is a complete player who can play in all phases of City’s game. He is the main player responsible for distributing the plays in Guardiola’s well-known and successful positional style of play. In addition to doing the “dirty work” in marking, Rodri is capable of finding solutions with brilliant passes and even deciding matches with shots from outside the area.
According to a survey by the Transfermarkt website , Rodri has only missed eight games due to injury in his entire career. Last season, he was the third player in European football with the most minutes played. See the top 5 below.
Valverde (Real/Uruguay) – 5,377 minutes on the pitch in 2023/24
Rice (Arsenal/England) – 5,324 minutes on the pitch in 2023/24
Rodri (City/Spain) – 5,275 minutes on the pitch in 2023/24
Saliba (Arsenal/France) – 5,250 minutes on the pitch in 2023/24
Foden (City/England) – 5,194 minutes on the pitch in 2023/24
Rodri’s absence would be a huge loss for Manchester City, given his quality alone. But the lack of a player with even a minimally similar characteristics in the squad makes the situation worse.
The most likely replacement is Kovacic, who, despite having great quality in ball control and passing, does not have Rodri’s strength in marking nor the same potential to participate in goals.
To make up for the lack of a defensive midfielder in the distribution of play, one of the alternatives could be, in addition to Kovacic, to launch another athlete to act in the sector in an improvised manner, as defender John Stones and full-back Rico Lewis have done at other times.
Pep Guardiola is a coach who doesn’t rest on his laurels and, even without much apparent need, he tends to change his team’s style of play over time. With this in mind, it’s very likely that we’ll see a different City if Rodri’s long absence is confirmed.
