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Kevin De Bruyne is Manchester City’s greatest-ever player. Erling Haaland is set to sweep up the club’s goalscoring records, or at least the ones he has not already claimed. Bernardo Silva made more appearances for City than anyone else over the last four decades, the most under Pep Guardiola, and often seemed to be the manager’s favourite.

Even so, Rodri, now on his way to Barcelona, may have been the player who most clearly embodied Guardiola’s years at the Etihad Stadium. It helped, naturally, that he scored the most significant goal of all, the strike that at last crowned City champions of Europe. Rodri against Inter in Istanbul: few fans will ever need that moment explained.

Rodri leaves Manchester City after a talismanic spell at the club.

Rodri was not only a towering presence, but also a symbolic one. Guardiola’s football was built from midfield, and Rodri became its supreme controller, regularly posting pass-completion numbers in the nineties while also excelling at regaining possession. He was both creative and destructive at once. He operated in Guardiola’s old position, yet he also broke through the ceiling that had long limited recognition for defensive midfielders.

Arguably, no one in that role had won the Ballon d’Or since Josef Masopust in 1962. Rodri did. No one had ever won the World Cup’s Golden Ball. Rodri did. He arrived at the Etihad Stadium with some doubts over whether he had cost too much, and with the challenge of adapting from Diego Simeone’s style of football to Guardiola’s, after City’s lengthy search for Fernandinho’s successor had included midfielders as different from one another, and from Rodri, as Fred and Jorginho.

Rodri scored the winning goal in the 2023 Champions League final.

It said much for Guardiola’s coaching that Rodri developed far beyond what had once seemed possible. In his early period at City, there were moments when he looked a touch cumbersome. By the time he reached his peak, however, the physical stature that made him taller than the classic midfielders of Guardiola’s Barcelona had become a strength, proof that the Catalan had adjusted to the English game by using more physically imposing players. When City won the Champions League, they were packed with size: a back four made up of defenders who were centre-backs by trade, plus Rodri, plus Haaland. It was a side with enough height to please Tony Pulis and the technical quality Guardiola always valued.

The final judgement may be that Guardiola’s City stopped being a truly great side on 22 September, 2024, the day Rodri suffered his cruciate ligament injury against Arsenal. A month later, they had tumbled into a sequence of nine defeats in 12 matches.

Rodri will leave Manchester City for Barcelona.

In the final 20 months of Guardiola’s reign, whenever City hinted at recapturing former glories, it was usually because Rodri was once again exerting enormous influence. There was the week in September 2025 when they beat Manchester United and Napoli before drawing away to Arsenal. There was also the four-match stretch in March and April when wins over Arsenal came either side of victories against Liverpool and Chelsea. In 2024-25, after returning from his knee injury, he started one match. City won it 5-2 against Juventus.

That did not feel accidental. Rodri had become a talismanic figure. In his final 75 starts before the spell that kept him out for eight months, and excluding penalty shootouts, City lost only once, in the 2024 FA Cup final. Across the last three-and-a-bit years before he was sidelined, he started 149 games and City were beaten in only 10 of them. They won the Premier League in each of those full seasons and lifted the Champions League once. In two other European campaigns, they went out once because of an absurdly late Real Madrid comeback and once on penalties.

It is notable that those three-and-a-bit years followed directly after a Champions League final in which Rodri was left on the bench. Then, at the age of 25, he took the next step and became a defensive midfielder capable of standing alongside any in Premier League history; Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira and N’Golo Kante now had company at the very top.

Rodri possessed an all-round skill set both in and out of possession.

There may be something apt about Rodri departing in the same summer as Guardiola, with the manager’s greatest creation leaving alongside him. It certainly reinforces the feeling that an era has come to an end, a sense made even stronger by City’s Community Shield demolition at the hands of Arsenal.

From a financial perspective, City have done very well with Barcelona: a fee of £65.4m for a 30-year-old in the final year of his contract. Yet replacing him will cost much more and, whether the successor is Ayyoub Bouaddi, Enzo Fernandez or someone else, City are likely to be taking a step down. They have already spent £116m on Elliot Anderson, and part of the task facing the former Nottingham Forest player is to grow into the authority that Rodri carried so naturally.

Rodri led Spain to World Cup glory.

The World Cup showed just how good he is, a footballer capable of lifting an already excellent team to an even higher standard. Barcelona, fresh from successive La Liga titles, may believe he can be the difference-maker for them in the Champions League. City, meanwhile, could look at Rodri’s total of 26 club starts last season and ask whether the World Cup-winning captain would have played often enough this year to help them reclaim the Premier League title. But it may always remain true that City’s greatest side, not just Guardiola’s best Manchester City team, existed when Rodri was at his peak.