Jamie Kemp: Invincible Rodri to drive Man City into 2024

ASK anyone at Opta what the best way to demonstrate a player’s performance through data is, and the chances are nobody would point towards an individual’s WDL record as the most optimal way. Suffice to say, in the era of expected assists and line-breaking passes, critiquing a midfielder for how many games he’s lost probably isn’t the best idea.

Every now and then, however, there comes along a run of results that doesn’t exactly follow along with the aforementioned ‘unwritten rules’ of analysis. It’s still decisively losing the battle in the long run, but sometimes football really can (still) be simple.

The player currently causing us to question all of this is Manchester City midfielder Rodri. That’s because the Spaniard’s next appearance, providing his team either win or draw, will be 50th consecutive game he’s played in without losing at club level. On the current run of 49 without defeat, Man City have faced Arsenal three times, Liverpool twice, Real Madrid twice and Bayern Munich twice, just to name a few. And of course, they won a treble in the time since their midfielder last tasted defeat.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of it all is that in the period since that run began – back on February 12th 2023 in a win over Aston Villa – all five of the games Manchester City have lost have occurred when Rodri hasn’t played. As well as that, each of the last four occasions in which they’ve failed to score have happened without him, while they’ve scored in each of his last 49 appearances, netting 132 goals and only conceding 39.

To compare the midfielder’s run with his peers, we can see that his feats are unique even while playing within the Manchester City machine. His current run of 49 games is more than double that of any Premier League player to have played at least once this season, with the player on the next-longest active run being Kevin De Bruyne (23 games).

Longest current unbeaten streaks by Premier League players (all competitions)

Rodri also stands poised to become the first player to go 50 games unbeaten while playing for Guardiola’s Manchester City, with his current run of 49 already the longest of any player during his tenure. The previous-longest run – held by Phil Foden – was set between December 2018 and March 2020, where he went 38 games without ending on the losing side. However, there’s a clear distinction to be made between the respective streaks by Foden and Rodri.

Across the Englishman’s run, Foden came off the bench more times than he was in the starting XI, with that frequent role as an impact substitute amounting to him playing 1,757 minutes across the 38 matches. In the case of Rodri, he’s racked up 3,988 minutes on the pitch during his unbeaten streak – more than double that of Foden – and done so right at the heart of events from his central midfield role.

Longest unbeaten streaks for Manchester City players under Pep Guardiola (all competitions)

Back in December, Manchester City published a video in which Pep Guardiola and the chess master Magnus Carlsen discussed strategy and the parallels between their different sports. When Carlsen was asked for his thoughts on those parallels, he offered an explanation to which Guardiola could be seen nodding in agreement in the background.

“I think in both chess and football, the important thing is to control the middle,” Carlsen said. “If you control the middle, you control the pitch or the board.”

If we’re to follow that line of thinking, then the collapse of Manchester City’s effectiveness when Rodri doesn’t play starts to find some reasoning. Since the start of his unbeaten run, Guardiola’s side have lost more often than they’ve won when the Spaniard hasn’t featured, and their effectiveness at both ends of the pitch has been hugely compromised.

Without his defensive security, positional sense and precision of pass, the Citizens haven’t been able to control the chess board in the same way. And from there, the framework for extracting results hasn’t provided its usual guarantees.

A Manchester City player not losing very often isn’t ground-breaking in itself, but given the longevity over which Rodri has avoided defeat – in conjunction with defeats and flat performances arriving in his absence, as if switching a light on and off – it’s one that we can’t put down as merely trivial.

Pep Guardiola’s teams have always been defined by midfield superiority. When Rodri isn’t in the middle of it all, it just so happens that Manchester City are substantially less superior. And we don’t need to consult the advanced metrics to show that.

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