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Only two Ballon d’Or winners have ever turned out for Manchester City – one of them was a 34-year-old George Weah, who played only nine matches for the club as his football career was drawing to a close.

25 players featured for the first team in the Blues’ famous treble-winning 2022/23 season. Only one of them scored the decisive goal and was named Man of the Match in the club’s first-ever UEFA Champions League final win.

Several of Manchester City’s most celebrated stars of recent years have also enjoyed success on the international stage and collected major honours such as the European Championships and World Cup.

Only one player has won both of those trophies – and was also named the best player at each tournament – while representing Manchester City.

Across all the years of success in East Manchester over the past decade and a half, none of the legends to have played at the Etihad Stadium have matched the range of achievements collected for both club and country by Rodrigo Hernandez Cascante.

Rodri added to an already crowded personal trophy cabinet by captaining Spain to the second FIFA World Cup in their history this summer, and in doing so pushed himself into the conversation with the greatest players ever to come from the Iberian nation.

There is also plenty of reason to discuss his legacy at Manchester City. Nostalgia can often stop sentimental supporters from valuing a current icon above old favourites, but here we look at the scale of the legacy Rodri has created in his seven years in blue, and where he could stand among the very best in the years ahead.

After early difficulties in his Manchester City career – some of them exaggerated by fans unfairly expecting an immediate replacement for the outstanding Fernandinho – Rodri soon became a vital part of the side that started collecting Premier League titles year after year.

Erling Haaland and Phil Foden were, at different times, the key goal sources, while Ilkay Gundogan and Bernardo Silva seemed to appear at every crucial moment and Kevin de Bruyne was Kevin de Bruyne. But for years, it felt as if City could keep winning only as long as Rodri was in the side.

The Spaniard’s Ballon d’Or-winning 2023/24 season saw him lose only once in an incredible 75 matches – that defeat came in the FA Cup final against Manchester United. A red card against Nottingham Forest and another later suspension for an accumulation of bookings meant the midfielder missed four league matches in that campaign – City lost all four.

Finding a replacement for Rodri has been one of the great problems of his time at the top with City, and it is still ongoing, perhaps now more than ever. Kalvin Phillips, Mateo Kovacic, Matheus Nunes and Nico Gonzalez have all been signed at considerable cost and asked to provide cover, but very few have managed to mount any real sustained challenge for the role.

It remains to be seen how Manchester City tackle the difficult task of moving on when the 30-year-old eventually ends his spell at the Etihad Stadium. Let us look further at what makes the Real Madrid-born midfielder’s achievements so special.

That 2024 Ballon d’Or is what will separate him from most others in future comparisons; to be named the best player in the world from outside the attacking positions is something only Fabio Cannavaro (World Cup winner) and Luka Modric (World Cup finalist and Champions League winner) had previously achieved since the start of the century. Lothar Matthaus in 1990 had been the most recent earlier recipient to play in defensive midfield.

With the award now so heavily influenced by the biggest honours in football – the official Ballon d’Or criteria now includes trophies won by a contender’s team, rather than focusing only on individual performance – Rodri winning it in a year when Manchester City fell at the quarter-final stage of the Champions League truly shows the scale of the achievement. Helping Spain to glory as the best player at Euro 2024, of course, played a major role.

That is not to suggest the Champions League is missing from the former Villarreal and Atletico Madrid man’s record. Even before he struck the winner in the 2023 final against Inter, Rodri had been outstanding in City’s famous run to Istanbul, smashing in a superb weak-footed opener in the quarter-final against Bayern Munich and standing out even in one of the best team displays the competition has ever seen as City dismantled Real Madrid in the semi-final.

Add to that two FA Cups, three League Cups, two Community Shields, the UEFA Super Cup and the former version of the Club World Cup – along with his earlier role in the unprecedented run of four Premier League titles in a row, driving the Blues to each success with his season-after-season consistency and missing only 15 of the 172 matches in that period – and Rodri’s club career is already legendary on its own.

On Sunday, though, Spain’s captain placed himself in an entirely different footballing pantheon. Seven players in history have won the World Cup, Ballon d’Or, Champions League and either the European Championships or Copa America: Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller, Zinedine Zidane, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Lionel Messi and now Rodri.

To achieve that after recovering from an ACL injury that ruled him out for almost an entire season, and also badly affected the following campaign, is a sign of the midfielder’s determination and drive, and can only strengthen his legacy further.

Appropriately for the debate being discussed, it was similar to Kevin de Bruyne announcing his return from a long spell out with a match-winning performance against Newcastle on the way to the Premier League title in 2024 – a display that began discussion about his standing as one of the league’s greatest ever players.

When de Bruyne brought his decade-long Manchester City career to an end in 2025, with 422 appearances, 108 goals, 170 assists and a huge haul of trophies, the broad view was that he was the greatest player in the club’s history. That is probably still the case.

But with what Rodri has achieved on the biggest stages – the winner in the Champions League final, Player of the Tournament in victorious Euro and World Cup campaigns, and a Ballon d’Or award that always escaped the brilliant Belgian – his dynasty will be remembered for a long time, not only at Manchester City but across the world.

So yes, de Bruyne still has the best City career. But by the time Rodri hangs up his boots, his may well be the most glittering overall record ever to include a spell in sky blue.

Of course, having plenty of silverware is only half the deal when it comes to being remembered as one of the best; people will also have to look back at how good a player you truly were.

What, then, makes Rodri great?

Sport is not about endless perfection. The greatest tennis players of all time win only a little over half the points they play in their careers, golfers do not hole-in-one every hole, basketball stars do not hit three-pointers with every shot and darts players do not land nine-darters on every throw.

In football, nobody completes 100% of their passes over an entire season, no striker scores with 100% of their shots and no goalkeeper saves every attempt they face in a campaign.

Nobody makes the perfect decision every single time. Rodri is the best because he gets as close to that as anyone can.

In a football world dominated by forwards, goals, assists and moments of brilliance, Rodri was judged superior to all of them because of his pure, consistent and ruthless efficiency – not that he lacks output, as 12 goals and 14 assists in his Ballon d’Or-winning campaign left him only 12 total contributions behind the tally of Vincius Junior, who was apparently ‘robbed’ of the award.

Defensive midfielders do not usually grab the headlines; Didier Deschamps was called ‘the water-carrier’ in France’s World Cup and Euros-winning side of 1998 and 2000, because he did the hard work and allowed the attackers to take the spotlight.

Rodri has made being a defensive midfielder fashionable. He has overtaken the legacies of all those who came before him – including fellow Spaniard Sergio Busquets and his former manager, Pep Guardiola – and now looks set to go down as the finest player ever in that position.

He is going to be a football legend. And he has done it while playing for Manchester City.