Can Man City recreate Rodri in the aggregate?

Pep Guardiola always has an answer. What is it?

Stats are from FBRef unless stated otherwise.

Let’s be real for a second: Rodri is not Manchester City’s most important player. This is not the worst thing that could happen.

Their most important player, obviously, is Erling Haaland. Football is a simple game made complicated by idiots like me. By far the most important thing you can do on the pitch is score lots of goals, and Haaland does that better than anyone. If he got ruled out for the season, that really would be time to panic.

Rodri, though, is an incredibly rare fixed point in this side. He, Haaland and Ederson are the only players to play pretty much all the time come rain or shine over the last two years. No sane football team rotates their goalkeeper if they have a half-decent one, so Ederson doesn’t really count. That means Rodri and Haaland are, if you like, the team’s two structural beams. Haaland will always be a fixed point upfront who others will work off. Rodri is the pivote starting and dictating the play who Guardiola will organise the rest of his midfield around. And now he isn’t there. Now anything could happen.

Guardiola’s systems tend to be so complicated and intricate that you can almost never just swap out one player for another. If you change one position, the knock-on effect tends to be that you tweak another, then another, then another, until the entire side looks different. That’s probably what it’s going to be like here. For all that he’s a structural beam, even Rodri himself has been used slightly differently across his time at the Etihad. Let’s dig into that a little bit so we can see what City will be missing and how they might go about solving the puzzle.