Jamie Carragher Urges Manchester City to Keep Rodri as Barcelona’s Opening Bid Is Rejected

Manchester City have turned down an opening offer from Barcelona for Rodri, judging the bid far too low for a player they signed for a club-record fee six years ago.

Sky Sports News reported the rejected offer sits close to £40m, a fraction of the £62.8m City paid Atletico Madrid for the midfielder in July 2019, when the transfer stood as a club-record fee at the time. City want closer to £60m if they are to sanction a sale this window, and sources in Spain believe Rodri would rather join Barcelona than Real Madrid, who have also shown long-standing interest in the 30-year-old Spaniard.

City have told Rodri they want him to stay and hope to agree a new contract before his current deal expires next summer. If he asks to leave anyway, the club says it will not stand in his way.

Carragher: “I’d rather keep him”

Jamie Carragher used his Sky Sports platform to argue City should resist any offer close to the figure Barcelona have put on the table.

“So, if I was the manager of Manchester City, I’d be keeping Rodri at that price,” Carragher said. “It’d have to be something really special to want me to lose arguably the best midfield player in world football.”

Carragher pointed to City’s title defense difficulties whenever Rodri has missed extended stretches through injury.

“I think it’d be really tough for them to win the Premier League without Rodri, even though they’ve got a lot of midfielders,” he said. “He’s the best, even though they’ve brought Elliot Anderson, who is one who I’m sure will learn off Rodri.”

Carragher referenced the season Rodri suffered a serious knee injury as evidence of the gap he leaves behind. “When Liverpool won the title under Arne Slot, Rodri got an injury in that season very early on, which helped Liverpool and was to the detriment of Manchester City. So if I was Manchester City, I’d be keeping him and letting him go on a free.”

He closed by returning to the numbers. “City paid £60m for him. If they’re getting £40m back now, what can they do with that type of money? Not a lot, really. So, I’d rather keep him.”

A World Cup captain at the peak of his value

Rodri enters this transfer saga off a summer that raised his profile beyond a football audience. He captained Spain to victory at the 2026 World Cup and remains the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, an award he collected in 2024 for his role anchoring City to a fourth straight Premier League title.

Pep Guardiola, who left City this summer after a decade in charge, called him “the best midfielder in the world by far,” and the numbers back up the assessment. City won the Premier League in four consecutive seasons from 2020-21 to 2023-24, and in the two campaigns where Rodri was sidelined for long stretches with injury, the club failed to retain the title.

Real Madrid have circled Rodri for over a year, and Sky sources say Barcelona are now the club he leans toward if he does leave the Etihad. A move to Camp Nou would reunite him with a group of Spain’s World Cup-winning squad already on Barcelona’s books, a factor Spanish reports believe is shaping his preference.

A trophy cabinet built around him

Rodri’s six years at City produced a run of silverware few midfielders in the modern game can match. He was the beating heart of the side that won the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League in the same 2022-23 season, and his own goal settled the Champions League final itself. Rodri struck in the 68th minute of a 1-0 win over Inter Milan in Istanbul, a goal that completed the treble and earned him the man of the match award from UEFA.

He followed that with a fourth straight league title in 2023-24 and a Ballon d’Or that recognized his role as the position’s benchmark. This summer added the biggest prize of all: Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, with substitute Ferran Torres scoring in extra time, and Rodri lifted the trophy as captain.

Spain went unbeaten across the tournament, outshooting Argentina 20-3 in the final without finding a way through in regulation before Torres settled it early in the second period of extra time. Enzo Fernandez, one of the players Man City are reportedly monitoring as a possible Rodri replacement, was sent off for Argentina in stoppage time at the end of normal time, leaving Lionel Messi’s side to play the extra period a man down.

Who replaces him?

City signed Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest this summer in a deal reported to be worth £116m, and the plan going into pre-season was for the 23-year-old to partner Rodri rather than replace him. If Rodri leaves, Anderson becomes the closest thing to a ready-made successor already on the books. Anderson’s box-to-box output through pre-season puts him in range of Rodri’s numbers, though he has not yet shown the positional discipline that made Rodri the league’s most complete holding midfielder.

Sky sources in Italy have also reported that Chelsea’s Enzo Fernandez would be Maresca’s dream target if Rodri does depart, with the Argentine seen as a fit for the possession-based system Maresca is building at the Etihad. Maresca worked with Fernandez at Chelsea before taking the City job this summer.

Barcelona’s summer spending

Barcelona have already broken their own transfer record once this window, paying Manchester City £1.25m for forward Kerolin in a deal that became the most expensive sale in Women’s Super League history. On the men’s side, the club has added Newcastle forward Anthony Gordon and Borussia Dortmund’s Karim Adeyemi as it looks to freshen an attack that carried Barcelona to domestic success last season.

Rodri would represent a different kind of statement signing: a specialist holding midfielder Barcelona have not replaced properly after Sergio Busquets left the club, and a player whose positional sense would let Hansi Flick’s successor build attacking football around a settled base rather than a rotating cast of makeshift options in front of the defense.

Real Madrid, for their part, have already strengthened elsewhere this summer. Jose Mourinho’s side completed the signing of Denzel Dumfries from Inter Milan on a four-year deal after triggering the Dutch full-back’s release clause, and has also added defender Marc Cucurella from Chelsea. Whether Real Madrid return with a fresh offer for Rodri, or shift their focus after missing out on him, remains to be seen.

A club in transition

The Rodri saga lands at a sensitive moment for City. Guardiola’s exit ended a nine-year spell that reshaped the club, and Maresca inherits a squad still adjusting to life without him. City won the EFL Cup and FA Cup last season but were pipped to the Premier League title by Arsenal, snapping the run of four straight championships that Rodri anchored.

John Stones left the club on a free transfer to join Inter Milan this summer, closing a decade at the Etihad that brought six Premier League titles and the Champions League. Losing Rodri on top of Stones would strip the squad of two players who started City’s treble-winning Champions League final together in 2023.

Maresca opens his first season in charge against Arsenal in the Community Shield on August 16, a fixture that will offer an early look at how City line up if the Rodri situation drags into the new season.

What happens next

The summer transfer window in England closes at 11pm on September 1, giving City and any interested party a little under a month to resolve the situation one way or another. Barcelona are expected to return with an improved bid, though there is no indication yet of when that offer might land or how much higher it would need to go to change City’s stance.

For now, City’s position is clear: they value Rodri above £40m and would prefer he sign the contract extension on the table rather than leave for a discount. Whether Barcelona are willing to meet that valuation, or whether Rodri’s own preference to join them forces the situation toward a compromise fee, will define one of the final acts of this summer’s transfer window.

Barcelona have their own financial balancing act to manage. The club is simultaneously fielding interest from Paris Saint-Germain in forward Ferran Torres, who has told the Catalan club he wants to move to France before their August 12 return date for pre-season training. Any fee Barcelona recoup from a Torres sale could feed directly into their offer for Rodri, giving both transfer sagas a shared deadline pressure as the window enters its final weeks.

Carragher’s intervention will not settle the matter, but it captures the scale of what City stand to lose. A player who scored the goal that completed a treble, lifted the World Cup as captain and still holds the Ballon d’Or is not easily replaced for £40m, whatever spreadsheet City’s recruitment team has run on Elliot Anderson’s ceiling.