Forty minutes of La Liga football for the signing of the summer
Roughly forty minutes. That is Rodri’s entire league output for Barcelona so far, split across two cameos, one against Athletic and one against Rayo Vallecano. For the player Barcelona hijacked from under Real Madrid’s nose, it is a strange way to start.
The Spanish press had the transfer done. Rodri to the capital, all but announced. Then the Catalans flipped it, and the best player at the last World Cup walked into Barcelona instead. The symbolism travelled further than the fee did.
El Chiringuito de Jugones reports the drip-feed is deliberate. Hansi Flick and his staff have run the numbers and do not believe Rodri can survive something close to 60 matches in a season as a weekly starter. The plan is a straight split of the role with Marc Bernal.
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A back operation, and a reputation that started cracking before it
Rodri had surgery on his back over the summer. Pre-season went out of the window with it. The questions about his body, though, were already circulating well before that, all the way through the argument over Spain’s World Cup squad.
His file explains the caution. The 2024 Ballon d’Or winner tore his ACL that September and lost most of the 2024-25 season to it. A midfielder who built an entire reputation on never missing anything is now being carried around like glass.
Bernal was meant to be the understudy
Marc Bernal gets the other half of the rotation. Catalonia has long treated the La Masia graduate as Rodri’s eventual replacement for club and country, and he is the one expected to soak up the low-stakes league fixtures while the bigger name sits.
The logic writes itself. Rodri for European nights and the fixtures that decide things, Bernal for everything else. Whether a player who has spent his career starting every week swallows that arrangement past October is a different question, and Flick will find out the first time Barcelona drop points without him.
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