Manchester City WON'T be allowed to field £40m Rodri backup this season

Manchester City fans received the news they were dreading ever since the 21st minute of Sunday’s draw with Arsenal on Monday, when reports emerged that Rodri will miss the rest of the 2024/25 season with a knee injury.

The Spain international limped off during the first half of the 2-2 stalemate with the Gunners after tussling with Thomas Partey at a corner and reportedly suffered an anterior cruciate ligament tear and will undergo surgery in Barcelona.

Rodri’s importance in Pep Guardiola’s team is hard to overstate, with FourFourTwo voting the Spaniard as the world's best defensive midfielder earlier this year, and the City boss will now need to devise a solution for his absence. Croatian Mateo Kovacic replaced Rodri from the bench this weekend, but Guardiola may now be ruing one of the club’s transfer decisions this summer.

Manchester City have a backup in Kalvin Phillips – as details of his loan deal at Ipswich Town are revealed

While Kovacic is a like-for-like replacement for Rodri, the club will be competing on four fronts this season and the Croatian cannot carry this load all by himself all season. Ilkay Gundogan, Rico Lewis and John Stones could potentially play in Rodri’s role, but the latter two especially would feel like square pegs in round holes.

The only other out-and-out defensive midfielder at City is Kalvin Phillips, but he joined Premier League new boys Ipswich Town last month in search of regular first-team football.

But any hopes of being able to bring the former Leeds United midfielder back to the fold at the Etihad have been dashed, with The Athletic reporting at the time of the move that it did not contain a recall clause.

Phillips’ move to Ipswich comes after he spent the second half of last season on loan at West Ham United as he looked to reignite his hopes of an England call-up for Euro 2024 after his lack of playing time at City had seen him dropped from Gareth Southgate’s squad.

But the 28-year-old struggled to hold down a place in the Hammers side and would miss out on this summer’s tournament in Germany. With Rodri entrenched in the City line-up and Kovacic backing him up, he opted for another move away from the Premier League champions for the 2024/25 season.

In FourFourTwo's opinion, City would benefit from being able to call on Phillips, even if it was via a January recall clause, so this is something of a misfire from the club. Rodri himself recently warned of the dangers of players being overplayed, so City cannot claim they weren't warned.

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Why did Kalvin Phillips not work at Manchester City?

Kalvin Phillips’ £42 million 2022 move to Manchester City came after the midfielder played a key role in Leeds United’s 2019/20 promotion-winning campaign and top-half Premier League finish in the subsequent season.

Former Whites boss Marcelo Bielsa had transformed Phillips from a useful academy graduate into the focal point of his relentlessly attacking side, with the local lad soon establishing himself in the England team and playing a key part in the Three Lions’ run to the Euro 2020 final.

The move to City was always an ambitious one for Phillips, who would be going from his role of being one of the main men at Leeds into a squad packed with some of the planet’s best players. There’s no shame in being second-best to Rodri, but on his limited opportunities, Phillips was unable to replicate his Elland Road form.

Guardiola would admit that he was struggling to get the best out of Phillips and this is one area where the City boss falls second-best to Bielsa. The Argentine was able to raise his player’s levels far beyond anything they had previously been capable of, evidenced by the fact he made limited adjustments to the mid-table Championship squad he inherited and led the core of this side to the top half of the Premier League.