Rodri was pretty young when he realised that he saw football in a different way to others. It wasn’t just his ability to pick a pass on the field, but the way he conceived the game off it. When he watched, he instinctively saw spaces and movement and only later realised that everyone else was simply following the ball. Football became not so much a pastime as a puzzle: a mechanism to be decrypted and understood.
As a child, making his way through the youth teams of Atlético Madrid, his father would urge him to get forward more, to score goals and make assists, to be more selfish. But Rodri always demurred. It was not that he was entirely selfless or free of ego. He understood freedom and fun, responsibility and reciprocity in a different way to most other players. Watching him today, seeing the trajectory his career has taken, allows us to do the same.
