Rodri: The most important player in the best football team in the world?
Multiple data sources agree: Man City without Rodri are a brilliant football team. With Rodri? For more than a year, they've been unbeatable
Erling Haaland scored five in a 6-2 FA Cup win for Manchester City last night but Rodri is the irreplaceable player in that team.
He was the most expensive player Manchester City had ever signed when they paid the £62.8m release clause necessary to acquire the midfielder, then 23, from Atletico Madrid in summer 2019.
In his first season at the club, in 2019-20, he played 52 matches in all competitions, with City winning 35 of them, for a win rate of 67.3%, and losing 11, including eight in the league. Liverpool romped to the title that season, 18 points clear of City in second place by the end of the campaign, which ended in July after a three-month Covid hiatus.
Since then, Rodri’s seasonal win percentage at City has not dipped below 73%. But to get to the bottom of his value to Pep Guardiola’s winning machine, let’s look at:
City’s record in each of those seasons
Where OPTA places Rodri using an interesting metric that aggregates individual performances in Europe’s top leagues
His position in the Premier League of passers
And the various sources that tell us he is doing all this as part of the world’s No.1 football team
