The Legacy of a Legend: How Rodri built the greatest dynasty in Manchester City history

Only two Ballon d’Or winners have ever played for Manchester City – one of those was a 34-year-old George Weah, who featured in just nine games for the club as his footballing career wound down.

25 players made first-team appearances in the Blues’ famous treble-winning 2022/23 season. Only one of those scored the winner and was named Man of the Match in the club’s maiden UEFA Champions League final victory.

Some of Manchester City’s most celebrated stars of recent years have succeeded on the international stage and been able to scoop prodigious prizes like the European Championships and World Cup.

Only one man lifted both trophies – as well as being named the best player at each tournament – while calling Manchester City his club.

In all the years of glory in East Manchester over the last decade and a half, none of the legends who have taken to the field at the Etihad Stadium have been able to match the breadth of achievements accrued for both club and country by Rodrigo Hernandez Cascante.

Rodri added to an already heaving personal trophy cabinet by captaining Spain to the second FIFA World Cup in their history this summer, in so doing catapulting himself into debate alongside all the greats of the game to have hailed from the Iberian nation.

Conversations are also worth having over his legacy at Manchester City. Nostalgia can often be a roadblock to sentimental supporters being able to value a current icon over their old favourites, but here we’ll explore the extent of the legacy which Rodri has built in his seven years in blue, and where he will rank among the best in years to come.

After initial struggles early in his Manchester City career – some of them overplayed due to fans unfairly expecting an instant successor to the superb Fernandinho – Rodri quickly established himself as a key component of the team which began to hoover up Premier League trophies year after year.

Erling Haaland and Phil Foden were, at various points, the crucial sources of goals while Ilkay Gundogan and Bernardo Silva appeared to pop up in every important moment and Kevin de Bruyne was Kevin de Bruyne. But for years, it seemed City could only keep winning so long as Rodri was in the team.

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

Replacing Rodri has been one of the great debacles of his time at the top with City (and which continues to rage on, arguably now more than ever). Kalvin Phillips, Mateo Kovacic, Matheus Nunes and Nico Gonzalez have all been brought in at great expense and tasked with providing cover, but few have been able to maintain any kind of consistent challenge for the spot.

It remains to be seen how Manchester City go about the unenviable task of moving on from the 30-year-old whenever he calls time on his stay at the Etihad Stadium. Let’s further explore just what is so unique about the Real Madrid native’s achievements.

That 2024 Ballon d’Or is what will set him aside from most others in the comparisons to come; to be named the best player on the planet from outside the attacking positions is something that only Fabio Cannavaro (World Cup winner) and Luka Modric (World Cup finalist and Champions League winner) had previously done since the turn of the century. Lothar Matthaus in 1990 had been the most recent prior recipient to play in defensive midfield.

With the award so weighted these days in favour of the biggest honours in football – the official Ballon d’Or criteria now encompasses trophies won by contenders’ teams, as opposed to solely individually – for Rodri to have won in a year in which Manchester City fell at the quarter-final hurdle in the Champions League truly underlines the enormity of the achievement. Helping guide Spain to glory as the best player at Euro 2024 admittedly went a long way.

That’s not to say that the Champions League is an omission from the former Villarreal and Atletico Madrid man’s CV. Even before he crashed in the winner in the 2023 final against Inter, Rodri had been magisterial in City’s iconic run to Istanbul, walloping in a sumptuous weak-footed opener in the quarter-final against Bayern Munich and managing to stand out even in one of the finest team displays the tournament has ever seen as City took Real Madrid to the cleaners in the semi-final.

Add to it two FA Cups, three League Cups, two Community Shields, the UEFA Super Cup and the former iteration of the Club World Cup – as well as his aforementioned contribution to the unprecedented four Premier League titles in a row, driving the Blues on to each success with his consistency season after season, and missing just 15 of the 172 games in that time – and Rodri’s club career is already legendary by itself.

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

To accomplish that feat after recovering from an ACL injury which knocked him out for almost a full season, and badly disrupted the following campaign too, is a testament to the midfielder’s determination and drive, and can only further count as a boost to his legacy.

Fittingly for the debate we’re discussing, it was reminiscent of Kevin de Bruyne announcing his return from a lengthy spell on the sidelines with a game-winning display against Newcastle en route to the Premier League title in 2024 – a performance which kickstarted discussion over his status as one of the league’s best ever.

When de Bruyne ended his decade-long Manchester City career in 2025, 422 appearances, 108 goals, 170 assists and a bucketload of trophies in tow, he did so with the general consensus being that he was the greatest player in the club’s history. That’s probably still true.

But with what Rodri’s done on the very biggest stages – the winner in the Champions League final, Player of the Tournament in victorious campaigns in the Euros and World Cup, an award in the Ballon d’Or which always eluded the brilliant Belgian – his dynasty will live long in the memory, not just at Manchester City, but worldwide.

So yes, de Bruyne’s remains the best City career. But by the time Rodri hangs up his boots, his might just be the most glittering overall resumé to ever contain a spell donning the sky blue.

Of course, having a whole load of silverware is only half the bargain when it comes to being remembered as one of the best; people will also have to look back on just how good a player you really were.

What makes Rodri great, then?

Sport isn’t about never-ending perfection. The best tennis players of all time win just over half the points they play in their career, golfers don’t sink a hole in one on every hole, basketball stars don’t shoot three-pointers every shot and darts players don’t hit nine-darters on every visit.

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

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

In a footballing landscape dominated by forwards, by goals and assists and moments of magic, Rodri was deemed better than all of them because of his pure, consistent, ruthless efficiency – not that he’s a slouch when it comes to output, as 12 goals and 14 assists in his Ballon d’Or-winning campaign put him just 12 total contributions behind the tally of Vincius Junior, who was apparently ‘robbed’ of the award.

Defensive midfielders don’t get the headlines; Didier Deschamps was termed ‘the water-carrier’ of the French World Cup and Euros-winning side of 1998 and 2000, because he did the dirty work and let the attackers take the limelight.

Rodri has made being a defensive midfielder fashionable. He has usurped the legacies of all who came before him – including compatriots Sergio Busquets and his former manager, Pep Guardiola – and will, it looks certain now, go down as the finest to have played in his position.

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