Rodri's Back Surgery: A Challenge for Manchester City's New Era

Enzo Maresca’s first significant act as Manchester City manager will be to do without his most important midfielder.

Rodri, fresh from lifting the World Cup with Spain and being named Golden Ball winner as the tournament’s outstanding player, will undergo surgery on a back problem on Monday, the Italian confirmed at his unveiling.

The timing is brutal.
The context even more so.

At 30, Spain’s captain arrives at the peak of his international powers, yet his club seasons have been fractured. An anterior cruciate ligament injury wiped out most of his 2024-25 campaign, and a string of setbacks last season meant Manchester City often had to cope without the man who has long been their metronome.

He rediscovered his authority on the biggest stage of all. At the World Cup, Rodri looked like the complete midfielder again: calm, dominant, decisive. That resurgence only underlined how much City had missed him.

Now comes another enforced pause.

“Now, [he has] surgery on Monday. Then he needs a holiday, he needs to rest and recover and then he will be back with us,” Maresca said, outlining a simple but stark plan: operation, recuperation, reset.

There was no timeline, no hint of when Rodri might be seen again in a City shirt. Maresca kept that detail close, refusing to be drawn on a return date. The priority, clearly, is to fix the issue properly rather than rush a player who has already endured two punishing seasons of stop-start football.

If the injury bulletin raised concern, the new manager moved quickly to shut down a different kind of anxiety: the swirl of rumours around Rodri’s future.

Reports in the past week have linked the Ballon d'Or winner with a move to Real Madrid. For a player of his calibre, and in his current glow after World Cup glory, speculation was always inevitable.

Maresca brushed it aside.

“Around big players there are always speculations so I am not worried about that,” he said, sounding utterly unmoved by the noise.

“I think it is normal, also because they [Spain] won the World Cup and because he is one of the best players. I think every manager wants to have Rodri because he is a top player.”

That last line tells its own story. Maresca knows exactly what he has inherited: a midfielder who shapes games, seasons, and now international tournaments. City’s new boss wants to build with Rodri, not plan without him.

For now, though, his first great on‑field pillar will be in a hospital gown rather than a sky-blue shirt. How quickly Rodri emerges from this latest setback, and how fully he returns to that World Cup level, may define the early chapters of Maresca’s reign.