Rodri Criticizes Referee's Leniency Towards Yamal in Semi-Final

Rodri walked off the pitch with a place in the final secured, but his mind was still on the referee’s whistle – or, in his view, the lack of it.

The Spain midfielder was incensed by what he saw as a wildly misleading foul count on Lamine Yamal, insisting the numbers bore little resemblance to the punishment the teenager absorbed.

“We have been dealing with this situation of the number of fouls for three games now,” Rodri said after the match, frustration still raw. “I understand that some might not be fouls, but we're talking about 10 or 15 fouls where the kid goes to the ground, gets tackled, and they have to call it, because otherwise the defenders are going to keep doing the same thing. The permissiveness has been quite blatant today.”

The official record told a starkly different story: just one foul drawn by Yamal all night. One.

That solitary whistle came in the 22nd minute, when the winger was clipped in the box and the referee pointed to the spot. Mikel Oyarzabal buried the penalty to open the scoring, a moment that should have underlined Yamal’s influence. Instead, it ignited another flashpoint.

Didier Deschamps was furious on the opposite bench, the France head coach openly questioning the standards of referee Barton after the game. Both camps, for very different reasons, left the stadium unconvinced by the officiating.

In the middle of that storm stood Yamal, who had turned 19 only the day before. Spain didn’t just ask him to create; they asked him to suffer, to run, to chase, to help cage Kylian Mbappé and blunt France’s attack. On the ball he had his moments, but it was his unseen graft that drew the loudest praise from inside the Spanish camp.

Rodri, speaking to TVE, could not hide his admiration. “Lamine Yamal played a fantastic game, especially off the ball he was sensational and helped us a lot,” he said, highlighting the teenager’s discipline and maturity in a game of suffocating stakes.

Yamal has only one goal to his name in the tournament, a modest return on paper for a player of such attacking talent. Inside the dressing room, though, nobody is counting. They have watched him track back, double up on Mbappé, and accept the bruises that come with being Spain’s most direct outlet.

Rodri’s irritation over the refereeing was not just about one night. He framed it as a pattern, a creeping concern as Spain edge closer to the trophy. With Argentina or England waiting in the final, he knows the intensity will spike again, and so will the tackles on players like Yamal.

For Rodri, consistency from officials is no longer a side issue. It is part of the preparation.

“Very happy, very proud, especially of my team, of my country, of what this represents for us,” he said, the anger giving way to something more reflective. “We have to rest and recover well because we surely have the most important match of our lives ahead of us. Rest and a huge match.”

The complaints about whistles will rumble on. The final will not wait.