Where Does Rodri Actually Rank?

Rodri completed 655 passes at the 2026 World Cup, which no player has matched in a single tournament on record.¹ He captained that team less than two years after tearing a knee ligament.²

Before that he already had a Ballon d'Or, a European Championship and the only goal of a Champions League final. None of it makes a highlight reel. Rodri's job is the pass before the pass, and that is why 14 rankings can put the same midfielder in 14 different kinds of company.

Football rankings run on goals. Rodri won everything there is without needing them.

Rodri vs Claude Makélélé: the destroyer's list

This ranking asks who the best holding midfielder in the game's history is. It is the one question about Rodri that needs no translation.

His 2026 World Cup is the fullest single-tournament case a defensive midfielder has assembled. He completed more passes in the final third than anyone else at the tournament and kept a 93 per cent completion rate while doing it.²

Claude Makélélé is the name the position is usually explained through, and the two men made their reputations in opposite directions. Makélélé's rested on what stopped happening when he played. Rodri's rests on what kept happening: Manchester City sides that won four Premier League titles, the Champions League, the Club World Cup, two FA Cups and three League Cups with him behind the ball.³

The case against him is short and honest. A holding midfielder gets judged by what his teams won, and nobody has yet managed to separate Rodri's trophies from Pep Guardiola's squads.

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Eight games, no rest

The expanded 2026 format meant the champion had to play eight matches rather than seven, a record.⁴ Rodri started all eight.²

Jude Bellingham is the midfielder whose tournament produced the clips. He scored six times for England and became the second-youngest player to score twice in successive World Cup knockout games, behind Pelé in 1958.⁵

Rodri has nothing of that kind to submit. Spain conceded one goal across the whole tournament, the first champion ever to manage it, and their captain spent five weeks recycling the ball until opponents ran out of ideas.⁴

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Rodri, Messi, Mbappé: one list, every position

Open the same tournament to every position and Rodri is standing among forwards.

FIFA's panel gave him the Golden Ball. Lionel Messi took the Silver and Kylian Mbappé the Bronze, which is the order almost nobody predicted in June.⁶

Mbappé's tournament was the spectacular one. He finished with 10 goals, took the Golden Boot for a second time after 2022, and moved ahead of Messi on the competition's all-time scoring list with 22.¹

Messi's case is the one that will be argued longest. At 39 he produced eight goals and four assists in his sixth World Cup, and lost the final.⁴ Rodri scored nothing across the eight matches and left with the trophy and the award.

The rest of the individual prizes went to Spain too. Unai Simón collected the Golden Glove after seven clean sheets in eight games, and the young-player award went to Pau Cubarsí, a 19-year-old centre-back.⁶ That is what a list of the tournament's best players looks like when the tournament was decided by defending.

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Everyone Pep Guardiola has coached

Guardiola's teams at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City collapse into one list here, and it is a crowded one.

Messi is the reason it is unwinnable. He has eight Ballon d'Or awards.¹ Rodri has one.

Rodri's claim is narrower and harder to wave away. Guardiola built four title-winning City midfields around him, and on the night of the Ballon d'Or said Rodri represents the club and Spanish football's influence on the game.³

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Manchester City's best buy of the Guardiola years

Rodri arrived from Atlético Madrid in 2019 and has been the shape of the team since.³

He played 56 matches in the 2022/23 treble season, more than any of his teammates.³ Availability is not a glamorous virtue — in a squad that size it decides seasons.

Erling Haaland is the signing that rewrote the record books instead. He scored 36 Premier League goals in his first season, more than anyone has managed in a single campaign.⁷

Haaland's case is countable, which is exactly why it is the easier one to make. Rodri's is that City's four titles all arrived with him in midfield.

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Villarreal, 2015: the Copa del Rey debut

Villarreal's all-time list is where Rodri appears as a teenager rather than a captain.

He joined the club's youth ranks in 2013, won the under-19 Champions Cup with the Juvenil A side, and made his first-team debut in 2015 at 19, in a 2-0 Copa del Rey win over Huesca under Marcelino García Toral.⁸

Juan Román Riquelme is the player Villarreal supporters name first, and he and Rodri could hardly be less alike. Riquelme's Villarreal was built on a No. 10 who slowed a game to walking pace. Rodri came off the same academy line and built a career on never letting a game slow down at all.

Villarreal have their own stake in the 2026 final. The club's website calls Rodri a star forged in its youth academy, a line it can now attach to a World Cup-winning captain.⁸

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The number on the back of the shirt

Rodri lifted the World Cup wearing 16.⁴ This ranking collects everyone who made that number theirs, which is the loosest thing on this page connecting any two footballers.

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Euro 2024: the award that came first

Two summers before New Jersey, Rodri had already been voted the best player at a major tournament.

UEFA's technical observers named him Player of the Tournament at Euro 2024, Spain's fourth European title. He was forced off at half-time of the 2-1 final against England and Spain finished the job without him.⁹

Lamine Yamal is the other name this list belongs to. He was Euro 2024's Young Player of the Tournament, he completed 35 dribbles this summer, more than anyone else in the competition, and he is the first footballer under 20 to hold both trophies.¹

Which of them owned that summer depends on what you replay. Yamal's Euro produced the moments people still send each other. Rodri's produced a Spain team that closed out a final without him on the pitch.

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Ballon d'Or: Rodri against Messi's eight

The 21st century's Ballon d'Or winners make a short and very lopsided list, and Rodri is on it once.

He won in 2024 as the first Manchester City player to do so, the first Premier League player since 2008, and the first Spaniard since 1960.³ The award almost never goes to a player whose job is holding a midfield together.

Then there is the arithmetic. Messi has eight of these.¹ One trophy in that company says less about volume than about what the voters were finally willing to reward.

youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-best-ballon-dor-winner-of-the-21st-century

Golden Ball: Zidane, Modrić, and now Rodri

The World Cup hands out its own best-player award once every four years, and this ranking sets the century's winners against each other.

Rodri is the newest entry. Winning it made him the fourth footballer to hold the World Cup, the European Championship, the Champions League and the Ballon d'Or, after Gerd Müller, Franz Beckenbauer and Zinedine Zidane.¹

Zinedine Zidane and Luka Modrić are the two names that make this list difficult. Modrić took the 2018 Ballon d'Or on the back of carrying Croatia to their first World Cup final,¹ and Zidane is the midfielder every midfielder here gets measured against.

Rodri's counter-case is one line long. Both of them collected their Golden Balls in finals their countries lost.

youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-best-world-cup-golden-ball-winner-of-the-21st-century

Istanbul, 2023: one goal, one treble

This ranking is about individual goals rather than players, and Rodri is in it for a single shot.

In the 2023 Champions League final he finished from the edge of the penalty box in the 68th minute, and that goal made Manchester City the second Premier League club ever to win the treble.¹⁰

It also explains what a holding midfielder is doing on a list of famous finals goals. Rodri scores rarely and usually from distance: 10 of his Premier League goals have come from outside the box.³

Sergio Ramos and most of the rest of this list have the drama. Rodri's goal has the consequence. Without it there is no treble and no first European Cup at Manchester City, and Guardiola's decade there reads as a domestic story.

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The knee, and the eight months after it

In September 2024 Rodri suffered anterior cruciate ligament damage, weeks before the Ballon d'Or ceremony he had already won.¹¹

It cost him more than eight months. The Ballon d'Or's own account of the comeback says he reached the World Cup surrounded by doubts about the long lay-off and about his form since returning.²

He then started all eight matches and lifted the trophy as captain.² Asked about it afterwards, he thanked the people who had helped him and added: "But I want to thank myself, to be honest, in those moments."¹¹

Ronaldo Nazário is the comeback every other comeback gets compared to, and that is the honest counter-case here. Ronaldo lost far longer to the same joint, and came back to win a World Cup anyway.

youpick.best/ranking/the-13-greatest-comebacks-from-injury-in-football-history

Spain's goalscorers of the 2020s: Morata's list

Álvaro Morata has 37 goals in 87 caps for Spain.¹² Rodri's decade with the same national team produced 655 passes in one tournament and an armband, which is why a scorers' list is the single place on this page where he has nothing to enter.

youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-best-spain-national-team-goalscorer-of-the-2020s

The signings everyone got wrong

This ranking gathers the players written off on arrival who turned out to be worth every penny, and Rodri qualifies for it twice over.

The first time was 2019. A Spanish holding midfielder who neither sprinted nor scored was not the marquee purchase Manchester City were expected to make, and four Premier League titles later the scepticism has aged badly.³

Mohamed Salah brings the tidier version of that story to this ranking, because a player who leaves England and comes back better has a shape people recognise. Rodri never left. He simply kept passing until the doubt ran out.

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The ranking Rodri will never win

A goalscorers' list has no room for him and never will. Every other list here does, because holding a midfield, keeping a ball and setting the tempo of a final are the things that decide tournaments and the things nobody makes a compilation of.

While Rodri was still recovering from the knee, Guardiola said that "at the World Cup will be the best Rodri and next season will be the best Rodri".³ The first half of that got settled in New Jersey — the second half starts in August.

Every list here was sorted one head-to-head at a time. If your case for a player rests on things a scoreboard never records, that is the method that finds it.

More rankings, more angles

• How Many Ways Can You Rank Luka Modrić? — Croatia's greatest, ranked without a World Cup
• How Many Ways Can You Rank Kevin De Bruyne? — City's other great passer, one line further forward
• How Many Ways Can You Rank Ferran Torres? — the substitute whose goal won Rodri's World Cup