Rodri to Undergo Back Surgery as Maresca Begins Manchester City Tenure

Enzo Maresca’s first significant act as Manchester City manager is not a signing, a tactical declaration or a bold prediction. It is confirming that the heartbeat of City’s midfield is heading for the operating table.

Rodri, fresh from lifting the World Cup with Spain and collecting the Golden Ball as the tournament’s outstanding player, will undergo surgery on a back problem on Monday.

The timing is brutal. The 30-year-old has just reminded the world why he is widely regarded as the premier midfielder of his generation, dictating Spain’s campaign and driving them to the title. At international level, he looked untouchable again. At club level, the story has been very different.

The last two seasons with City have been stop-start, then stop again. An anterior cruciate ligament injury wiped out most of his 2024-25 campaign. Attempts to build rhythm last season kept colliding with setbacks, leaving him in the stands more often than Maresca – or Pep Guardiola before him – would ever have wanted.

Yet when he arrived at the World Cup, the rust fell away. Rodri played like the version City fans had come to expect before the injuries: commanding, precise, relentless. It was enough for the Ballon d'Or winner to drag his country to the summit of the game once more.

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 at his first news conference as City boss, laying out the immediate plan without placing a date on the midfielder’s return.

No timeline. No promises. Just the reality that City’s new manager will begin his tenure without the man who so often knits their structure together.

The absence of detail on his comeback will only fuel questions, but Maresca chose to tackle a different narrative instead – the one swirling around Rodri’s long-term future. Reports in the past week have linked the Spaniard with a move to Real Madrid, a familiar storyline whenever a world-class Spanish player dazzles on the biggest stage.

Maresca brushed it aside.

“Around big players there are always speculations so I am not worried about that,” he said. For him, the noise is simply the cost of having a player of this calibre. “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 felt less like flattery and more like a statement of the obvious. City know exactly what they have. So do their rivals.

For now, though, Maresca’s challenge is clear: reshape a side that has grown used to Rodri as its reference point, while waiting for his midfield general to come back from yet another physical battle. How City cope in those weeks and months without him will say plenty about the early stages of this new era at the Etihad.