Manchester City may have entered the season as the favorites to win a fifth successive Premier League title, but the calculus on their chances to extend their winning streak shifts considerably now that Rodri is expected to miss much of the campaign with an knee injury.
Rodri came off in the first half of City’s 2-2 draw with Arsenal on Sunday with the injury, leaving a big hole in City’s midfield in the process. The Spain international has been the most important player during the team’s recent streak of dominance, averaging 50-plus games a season since moving to England in 2019. City have lost just 11 percent of the games in which he has played, leaving manager Pep Guardiola with a tactical conundrum that might be unlike any other he has faced in his eight-year spell at the club.
Here’s a look at Guardiola’s options as he begins to plan for a season without Rodri.
Mateo Kovacic
The most obvious answer to the question of who might step into City’s lineup now is Mateo Kovacic, who came on for Rodri against Arsenal and has already started most of the team’s games this season while Guardiola afforded extra rest after the Euros. Kovacic has played alongside both Ilkay Gundogan and Rico Lewis this season in City’s midfield, a plan that has worked well so far.
In his 69-minute appearance against Arsenal on Sunday, Kovacic had 92 touches and 86 passes – behind only defenders Ruben Dias, Kyle Walker and Manuel Akanji – boasting a passing accuracy of 95.3%, as well as a 96.6% completion rate in the attacking third. Those figures are actually better than his impressive performances so far this season – he averages 73 touches per game, as well as a passing accuracy of 95.2 percent. He’s in the Premier League’s top five for touches by a defensive midfielder, and second only to Akanji for passing accuracy by players who have played 300-plus minutes.
Though goals are not necessarily a crucial part of his game, he also already has one this season and has created seven chances so far in league play.
Someone else
With or without Rodri’s injury, Kovacic was likely to play a lot of minutes for City this season because the team is poised for another 50-plus game season between domestic competition, an expanded UEFA Champions League slate and an even bigger Club World Cup in the summer. That poses a different question for Guardiola, who prefers to rotate as much as he can to combat fixture congestion – who might play the minutes that were originally earmarked for Kovacic?
Gundogan and Lewis are natural contenders in case Guardiola opts to change the cadence of his rotation patterns in Rodri’s absence, but he may have to call upon others over the course of the season. John Stones could benefit from the newly available game time, despite making his lone start of the season as a center back. The 30-year-old has made two substitute appearances as a defensive midfielder, including a 12 minute cameo against Arsenal in which he scored the equalizer, but how much Guardiola plans to call on him is a big question mark. Someone like Matheus Nunes could also be in the mix, but he has only played 20 minutes so far in the league this season.
Is Rodri replaceable?
The next few months for Guardiola will be an exercise in answering an unenviable question – how do you replace the irreplaceable? Guardiola’s City team is like a gathering of the best of the best in every position, and yet the undisputed leader of that pack was Rodri. Rare were the days they lost with him in the lineup, and even rarer were the days that he was unavailable. He has played 260 times for the team in five years, a constant during an era of success that felt inevitable for City.
Rodri is more than a stalwart defensive midfielder, though, which makes him even harder to replace. His ability to be involved in attack is unrivaled for players in his position, offering a little bit of everything in a way that perfectly suits Guardiola’s style of play. It might not actually be possible to replace Rodri specifically since he’s a one-of-a-kind player. Instead, Guardiola might have to maximize his players’ talents rather than ask them to mimic Rodri, which could force him to get creative. The good news for him is that he has a decent track record in this category – City teams survived injuries to Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland last season. Replicating the same without Rodri, though, might be a very different story.
