Rodri's Comeback Isn't Finished: A New Injury Cloud Right Behind It

Rodri goes into Sunday's World Cup final having played, by the numbers, the best football of anyone at the tournament. No player has more touches (794), completed more passes (655) or made more line-breaking passes (106) through the semi-final stage. It is exactly the kind of form that won him the 2024 Ballon d'Or - and for most of the last two years, it has felt like the exception rather than the rule.

Because while Rodri has been the best midfielder at this World Cup, reports out of England say his club season is about to start the same way the last one ended: on the treatment table. Manchester City are expected to send him for surgery on a new injury the moment Spain's tournament finishes, with the club braced to open its 2026-27 season without him.

The tear that could have ended a Ballon d'Or reign

Rodri's injury story starts on 22 September 2024, in a Premier League match against Arsenal, weeks after he had been named the world's best player. He ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament and damaged the meniscus in his right knee, an injury that required immediate reconstructive surgery and wiped out essentially his entire 2024-25 club season.

Pep Guardiola said at the time that Rodri could be out for nine to twelve months. City's midfield, built for two years around his passing range and positional sense, spent that season visibly missing him - a title race lost, a manager under more pressure than at any point in his decade at the club, and a Ballon d'Or winner who could not take the field.

Eight months back, then a second setback

Rodri returned faster than Guardiola's own estimate - back on the grass in training by February 2025, then ten minutes off the bench against Bournemouth in City's penultimate league game of the season, just under eight months after the injury. It should have been the end of the story. It wasn't.

Soft-tissue problems followed almost immediately - groin and hamstring issues through the second half of 2025 and into 2026 that kept interrupting his return to full training and matches. Guardiola himself cautioned publicly that Rodri's true peak form might not reappear until after the 2026 World Cup. Twelve months on from the ACL tear, City had a fit-again Ballon d'Or winner who still couldn't string together a settled run of matches.

The best midfielder at the World Cup, again

Then the World Cup arrived, and Rodri looked like himself again. Spain's captain has been the platform underneath their run to Sunday's final against Argentina - a straightforward 2-0 semi-final win over France that owed as much to Rodri controlling the game's rhythm as to anything that happened in the final third. "Back to his Ballon d'Or-winning best," is how ESPN put it heading into the final, and the underlying numbers back that up: nobody at the tournament has touched the ball more, completed more passes, or broken more lines with a single pass than Rodri has through six matches.

Tournament touches

794 - most of any player

Passes completed

655 - most of any player

Line-breaking passes

106 - most of any player

Ballon d'Or

Won 2024

"I'm here to win," Rodri said in the build-up to the final, warning that Sunday's game against Argentina would be the hardest of the tournament physically. It is the kind of statement that, eighteen months ago, would have sounded like wishful thinking from a player who could not stay on the pitch. This week, it reads as a simple statement of where his form actually is.

A new manager arrives as a new injury surfaces

Off the pitch, Manchester City has changed underneath him. Pep Guardiola stepped down in May 2026 after ten seasons and twenty major trophies, moving into a global-ambassador role with City Football Group. On 29 June 2026, City appointed Enzo Maresca - who had coached the club's youth teams and served as an assistant during the 2018-19 treble season - as Guardiola's successor on a three-year deal.

Maresca's first serious selection headache arrived before he had overseen a competitive match. Reports in mid-July said Rodri would need surgery on a new, undisclosed injury once his World Cup campaign was finished, and that he was expected to miss the start of City's 2026-27 season as a result - a fresh blow layered directly on top of eighteen months defined by fitness setbacks, arriving in exactly the week Rodri was playing his best football since the Ballon d'Or year.

What's actually still unknown

The precise nature of the new injury has not been made public, and reporting on it has been notably cautious - several outlets describe the procedure as minor and the rehabilitation as "not a long process" rather than another lengthy layoff. That is a meaningfully different picture from the ACL tear, which was a season-ending injury from the moment it happened. This one reads, so far, as a smaller interruption to a career that has spent two years lurching between brilliance and the treatment room.

What is not in doubt is the form he takes into Sunday. Whatever Manchester City's medical staff have planned for the days after the final, Rodri arrives at MetLife Stadium this weekend as the form player of the tournament - a Ballon d'Or winner who spent a year and a half proving fitness and top form don't have to arrive on the same day, and who now has one match left to find out whether they can arrive on the same one after all.