Manchester City signed Spanish midfielder Rodri this past summer from Atletico Madrid for a club record £62.8m fee. Since then, Pep Guardiola has been heaping praises upon the 23-year-old, telling BBC Sport that he’s become more and more convinced the player will be one of the club’s best signings an “incredible for [City] for many years.”
The praises from Guardiola continued on Saturday in an interview with BT Sport, but this time around the compliments seemed to focus more on the player’s looks, for some reason.
“Rodri will be incredible for us.
“He doesn’t have tattoos or earrings. His hair, he looks like a holding midfielder! A holding midfielder must be like this, think about the rest [of the team].”
Even in a best-case scenario, this quote ends up being a clumsily worded commendation of how Rodri’s lack of body modifications serves as some sort of proof that he has the kind of no-frills personality type that Guardiola believes holding midfielders need to have in order to be successful. But the conclusion itself is still shaky as there have been plenty of decorated players in that position who have had their heads deep up their own asses (i.e. Roy Keane). It’s not necessarily a bad thing since you need some sort of strong ego to make it in any professional sport, yet it is annoying when the opposite personality type is lionized in this fashion. Above all else, Rodri is talented enough on his own that literally anything else about who he is, and what he can do, could have been used to put this talented signing on a higher pedestal.
Of course, there’s a chance that I’m just not understanding the thought process that a soccer genius like Guardiola went through to stake this claim. Maybe he’s the correct one here and things like a player’s hairstyle can actually serve as an indicator for one’s talent level. This then might explain why the manager’s playing career took a nosedive in his late twenties, once he started seriously balding.