Before we get started: None of this is going to matter when Manchester City face Slovan Bratislava, who lost their opening UEFA Champions League match to Celtic 5-1. It likely won't be a problem against Fulham because that match is at home, and it probably won't matter away to Wolves, who have earned six total points in the Premier League since the end of March.
Sparta Prague at the Etihad? Should be fine. Southampton at the Etihad? Should be a blowout too. So, even though it already seems like Man City can't withstand the loss of Rodri, their world-class midfielder and arguably the best soccer player on the planet, after the 1-1 draw with Newcastle on Saturday, we could very easily find ourselves flipping the calendar from October to November and wondering what all the fuss was about.
City should cruise in the Champions League, and they might have nine points from nine in the Premier League over the next month. In fact, that is the most likely outcome. But almost every big club can face the loss of any star player for a short period of time. City expect to play somewhere around 60 matches this season -- something Rodri himself was sounding the alarm on right before his knee gave out against Arsenal. That means City have about 50 more games to play this year without the best midfielder in the world.
Will they be fine? Are they doomed? Can Pep Guardiola lock himself in a dark room for multiple days and come out with some magical solutions? Your answers to those questions say a lot about how you think soccer works.
How much is any player worth?
Whether you like looking at it like this or not: every player in the Premier League is contributing some number of points to his team's performance every season. That number could be positive, it could be zero, or it could be negative. But when you look at the table at the end of the season, if a team has 72 points, each player on the roster who appeared in a match was responsible for some portion of those points.
The trouble, of course, is that it's pretty much impossible to parse out how much each player is contributing to those totals, because soccer is a dynamic, interconnected mess where no one thing happens without 100 other things happening before, after and concurrently. Also, the sport's currency is goals, and there are only about three of those per game.
But despite all that, we can still try to put some ballpark numbers on player value.
In baseball, there's the concept of the replacement-level player, which Fangraphs defines as such: "Replacement level is simply the level of production you could get from a player that would cost you nothing but the league minimum salary to acquire." The vocabulary of player-performance in baseball is anchored to the replacement-level player -- i.e. players are judged by how much better (or worse) they are than the theoretical replacement-level roster-filler.
For replacement-level in soccer, we can just call it "relegation level." Over the past five years, the relegated Premier League teams have averaged 27 points. Across that same stretch, City have averaged 88 points. As a whole, then, City's players have been worth 61 points above relegation level, per season. If the same 11 players played every minute for Manchester City and contributed the exact same amount to the team's overall performance, we could say that each of them was worth 5.5 points above relegation, per season.
This, obviously, isn't how it works. Not all 11 Manchester City players are equal, and almost no one plays every minute.
Rodri played around 85% of City's Premier League minutes in each of the past two seasons -- and that led the team, in both seasons, among outfield players. However, he did play almost every high-leverage minute -- most of those minutes he didn't play were because Guardiola was rotating the squad or the game was already out of reach. And given that he's a legitimate Ballon d'Or candidate at a position (defensive midfield) that almost never comes close to winning the sport's top individual prize, it seems safe to assume that Rodri is contributing more than the average Manchester City player.
Janusz Michallik worries about what he saw from Manchester City in their 1-1 draw with Newcastle.
Let's say Rodri is worth eight points above relegation level -- that's 0.21 points per game, and City had 33 Premier League games remaining when he tore his ACL. Ergo, that's seven points of above-relegation-level performance that City are losing. So if we projected City to finish with their five-year average of 88 points at the start of the season, those seven lost points would drop them down to 81, which would earn you third place in most of the recent Premier League seasons, and would have been fourth last season.
So, does this mean Arsenal and Liverpool will finish ahead of City? It's definitely in play, but the problem with looking at things like this is that City won't be replacing Rodri with a relegation-level player. It'll be some combination of Mateo Kovacic, Ilkay Gündogan, Rico Lewis, John Stones and maybe Matheus Nunes eating up his minutes. These are all much better than relegation-level players.
I don't know where to benchmark their performance, exactly -- but let's say, combined, they're at a fourth-place level, roughly. That's, on average, about 68 points per season. So: 41 points above relegation-level for the whole season, divvied up evenly for 3.7 points per 11 players. That's about 0.1 points per game, across 33 remaining games: 3.3 points, compared to the seven from Rodri, and we'll say Rodri's injury should cost City about four points. Bump them down from 88 to 84 points -- and that's exactly the average of the Premier League's second-placed team over the past five seasons.
Tidily enough, ESPN BET's odds now have Arsenal as the Premier League favorites, slightly ahead of City.
Pep Guardiola says Man City will "have to find a way" to play without Rodri for the rest of the season.
Why Rodri is so important, and why he doesn't have to be
Four points doesn't really feel like much, but in an 11-man sport where everyone plays offense and defense and there isn't a single position (like, say, an NFL quarterback) that correlates incredibly highly with team performance, I think we do tend to overestimate the impact of individual players across a 38-game season.
Most soccer players did not fall out of a coconut tree; they exist in the context in all of which they live and what came before them. This even applies to, say, a fantastic individual goal where a winger gets the ball wide, slides past multiple defenders and then bends the ball into the upper corner.
Someone has to get the winger the ball; someone else has to make sure that the team has possession in the first place so the ball could then get to the winger; and someone has to make runs off the ball that create enough space for the winger to be able to score the goal. On a stat sheet, the winger gets "one goal" apportioned to his name, and that seems correct, but in reality a bunch of players contributed to at least a portion of that goal.
However, there are some players who create the context -- an idea I recently picked up from University of Pennsylvania professor Cade Massey. In other words, there are players with certain abilities that allow their teams to function in a certain way -- a quality that would not get picked up in any kind of individual stats, but would also boost the individual stats of all that player's teammates and their team as a whole.
There's a pretty good argument that Rodri is the rare player who both creates the context and also flourishes within it. In the past, elite defensive midfielders created context by allowing their teams to play more attackers. Their ability to read space and control possession meant that they maintained more of the ball, and in turn allowed those extra attackers more opportunities to create goals. Equally, their ability to win possession, but also read the flow of the ball and snuff out counter-attacks before they started -- the latter is more important -- meant their teams could perform at a high defensive level without putting as many defensive personnel on the field.
Rodri doesn't do that. In fact, he might do the opposite.
Steve Nicol says Pep Guardiola will find a way for Manchester City to continue to succeed without star midfielder Rodri.
City now basically play with four center-backs at all times. Even Kyle Walker, formerly a get-to-the-endline full-back, now plays much more like an outside center-back in a back three. And yet: City have averaged 95 goals over the past two seasons.
Some of that is due to world-class attackers like Erling Haaland and Kevin De Bruyne, but I feel confident in suggesting that much of it is due to Rodri. He adds to City's defensive strength, both from his reading of the game and his ability in the air. At 6-foot-3 and 180-ish pounds, he is an absolute unit. But then he's also one of the best passers in the world and also scores and creates a lot of goals despite playing as a holding midfielder.
Put another way, City are able to play more defensive personnel in order to boost their defensive strength because someone like Rodri is able to do the normal defensive work of a defensive midfielder, and the normal passing work of a defensive midfielder, while also contributing goals and assists at a high level.
Since 2017, across Europe's Big Five leagues, there have been eight seasons in which a player made at least 90 tackles+interceptions in a season, completed at least 90% of his passes, and played at least 250 progressive passes, per the site FBref. Three of those seasons were Rodri's three most-recent seasons. In the five non-Rodri seasons, those players combined for two non-penalty goals and 12 assists. In the three Rodri seasons, he's scored 17 non-penalty goals and added 17 assists.
Across the modern era of the sport, I'm not sure there's been another player quite like him. He's good at everything.
And so, there's certainly a world where these point-value estimates don't come close to accounting for the loss of Rodri's impact. Unfortunately for City, this is by design.
At the beginning of last season, City were struggling with injuries and Guardiola was fed up with all of the questions. 'You have comparatively unlimited money! Why don't you build out a bigger team?'
"When you have 20 players and six injuries they say you should have a bigger squad, but what happens when I don't have injuries? How can I manage that?" he said. "I can play just 11. If 14 don't play for a long time, I don't want to be manager.
"Every new player is a transfer or salary. That's because when you recruit, you have to look for players who can play in two or three positions. Bernardo [Silva] can do that, Phil [Foden], Julian [Alvarez], Oscar Bobb. When people say they want two players for every position, I don't agree with that."
By targeting these unique player types and purposefully keeping the squad small, Guardiola is almost making his team specifically vulnerable to injury, but by definition, these players are harder to replace. Plus, this idea sounds great in theory -- Foden can be your starting right winger, your backup No. 10 and your third-string No. 8 -- but he can't play those positions at the same time. So, when someone gets injured and you have to replace him with a versatile player who was previously playing a different position, that previous position suddenly loses its depth.
Now, City's stats are terrible without Rodri. They haven't lost a Premier League game with him since February 2023, and they've only lost 19 games across his 174 league appearances since joining the club in the summer of 2019. In the 21 games they've played without him, they've lost seven -- a 33% loss rate, up from 11%.
Against a struggling Newcastle side, they were quite poor this past weekend. In fact, it's one of the worst offensive games I can remember them playing:
But they also did look fine earlier in the season without Rodri. In fact, after a long summer with Spain winning Euro 2024, the Arsenal match was his first Premier League start of the season. The Kovacic-Lewis midfield held up just fine in the opener against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, and I'm sure Guardiola will come up with a bunch of different ideas to replace a player who seems irreplaceable.
However, the reality is that City chose to come into this season with only one true holding midfielder on the roster. They also chose to come into the season with only one true striker, after the versatile Alvarez was allowed to leave for Atletico Madrid because, as Guardiola predicted, players want to leave when they don't play as much as they think they should. On top of that: City's third superstar, De Bruyne is 33 and struggling with injuries once again.
We've seen Guardiola find a way to keep his team functioning at a high level when a star goes down, and we've seen him regenerate the team when other context-creating stars -- like Fernandinho -- finally lose their legs. In particular, they won 98 points in a season when KDB only started 11 matches. But with Rodri already gone for the season, they're now at a higher risk of being without Rodri and another star at the same time. It certainly seems like there's a multiplicative effect when Rodri and De Bruyne are both out; since 2019, City have four points from the seven matches in which neither of them played.
So, unless City go wild with acquiring reinforcements in the January transfer window, we're going to figure out one of two things from here on out: Either Rodri isn't as important to Manchester City's success as most of us think he is, or Guardiola created a situation for himself where he finally has a player who he can't afford to lose.