Rodri Left Manchester City for Barcelona, but Defends the Club After Guilty Verdict

• Rodri left Manchester City for Barcelona this summer after seven years and four Premier League titles, but he says he still believes in his old club’s innocence after an independent panel found City guilty on 114 of the 115 financial charges against it.
• Speaking at Wembley before captaining Spain to a 3-2 win over England, the 2024 Ballon d’Or winner said City had told players for years they had done nothing wrong, just as they did in a separate UEFA case in 2020 that was later overturned.
• Rodri said the success he shared with Pep Guardiola and the club’s staff “isn’t paid for with money” and cannot be taken away, whatever the Premier League decides.

A Ballon d’Or Winner Speaks Up for the Club That Made Him, Months After Leaving It

Rodri does not play for Manchester City anymore. He left for Barcelona in the summer, ending a seven-year run that brought four Premier League titles, a Champions League and a Ballon d’Or. None of that stopped him standing in front of the media at Wembley last week and defending the club he used to captain, shortly after Manchester City were found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier League.

“I believe in the innocence of the club,” Rodri said. “I know the club well. We were told at the time to be calm, and that everything had been done properly.”

The charges relate to alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules from a period before Rodri joined City in 2019. An independent panel found City guilty on 114 of the 115 counts, according to multiple reports. City have not commented beyond their long-standing denial of wrongdoing, and no sanctions have yet been decided.

“We Experienced an Identical Process in 2020”

Rodri has been here before, or at least the club has. He pointed back to UEFA’s 2020 investigation into City, which ended with a two-year ban from European competition before that punishment was thrown out entirely on appeal.

“We experienced an identical process in 2020, if I remember rightly,” he said. “From the club, they always told us to be calm, that we’d be acquitted, that we hadn’t done anything, and the club was found not guilty … Let’s hope justice can be done. But I believe in the innocence of the club.”

That case centred on how City reported sponsorship income in the Sheikh Mansour ownership era. UEFA’s own disciplinary body issued a two-year ban from European competition and a fine before the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the ban entirely and reduced the fine. City have long pointed to that outcome as proof that early reports of guilt do not always survive appeal, and it is clearly the memory Rodri reached for at Wembley.

This time the numbers are bigger. The Premier League’s independent commission examined 115 charges spanning 2009 to 2018, covering allegations that City misstated manager and player pay, breached Premier League financial rules and failed to cooperate fully with the League’s investigation, which began in February 2023 and ran through a hearing lasting 12 weeks. City deny wrongdoing and have not commented on the specific reports that a majority of the charges have been upheld. An appeal process, separate from the original commission, is expected next, with City widely anticipated to contest the verdict.

A Player Who Left, Still Talking Like One of the Family

What makes Rodri’s intervention notable is timing and position. He is no longer a City player answering for his employer. He is a Barcelona player, a World Cup winner with Spain, and by his own admission someone watching City’s case from the outside now, the same position as any pundit or fan. He chose to speak anyway.

“For us the players, it’s a different thing than for you guys,” he said, addressing the media directly. “I understand all kinds of opinions. It’s something that’s big now, but we always try to think positive. When you live daily at that club, with all the people that worked hard all these years to have the success we had, with Pep, the owners, everyone who worked on that … They can’t take that from us. It’s something that isn’t paid for with money, it’s effort, partnership, standing shoulder to shoulder. We had a lot of success, here at Wembley, and I can tell you that everything was deserved.”

Wembley is not a neutral word in that sentence. City beat Manchester United there in the 2023 FA Cup final on the way to a historic treble, the same season Rodri scored the winning goal in the Champions League final against Inter Milan and picked up the Ballon d’Or off the back of it. Asked directly how he would feel if the guilty verdict were confirmed, having been told by City’s hierarchy for years that the club had done nothing wrong, Rodri did not hedge.

“They always told us the confidence they had in their innocence, and when you look in someone’s eyes and they tell you that …” he said. “We were always calm, we never saw the team nervous with these kinds of things. Everyone has to follow the rules, I support that, but it’s part of football today. They always expressed confidence that they never did anything wrong, and we believed in that. I’ve been there, I know how they work, so that’s what I can tell you.”

What Happens to the Trophies If the Charges Stand

The stakes behind Rodri’s defence are enormous. City have won six Premier League titles in the eight seasons after 2018, including four of Rodri’s own, plus that 2023 treble. Now that the findings have been confirmed, if punishment follows, precedent elsewhere in English football shows sanctions can range from points deductions to fines to, in the most severe cases raised by legal commentators, questions over whether trophies won in the sanctioned years could be stripped or asterisked. Everton and Nottingham Forest have both been docked points in recent seasons for breaching separate spending rules, and Derby County lost 21 points in a single season for entering administration and breaching accounting regulations, a much smaller case by comparison but proof the League is willing to act on financial breaches once they are proven.

None of that featured in what Rodri said out loud. He kept his answers on the players who lived through the trophies rather than the punishment that might follow them, and he did it as somebody with nothing left to gain personally from defending City. His new club, Barcelona, has no stake in the outcome. His current international commitments, captaining Spain to a 3-2 win over England at Wembley that stretched their unbeaten run past two and a half years, had nothing to do with his old one. He chose to answer the question anyway, repeatedly, in detail, days after the verdict landed against the club that made him one of the best midfielders of his generation.

The Loyalty That Outlasted the Move

Players leave clubs and move on from them all the time, in interviews as much as on transfer deadline day. Rodri did not. Asked again about the charges after his opening answer, he did not deflect toward Barcelona or toward his new life in Spain. He returned to the same theme: the people who built City’s run of titles, the manager who shaped him, and a belief that whatever the commission decides, it cannot rewrite what he lived through on the pitch.

Manchester City will find out in the coming weeks what sanctions, if any, follow the panel’s ruling, and whether an appeal can change the outcome. Rodri will not be there for it in a City shirt. He made clear at Wembley that he did not need to be.

Rodri’s stock has rarely been higher. He was named player of the tournament as Spain beat Argentina 1-0 to win the 2026 World Cup, adding that honour to the Ballon d’Or he already held, and he arrived at Wembley as captain of a side that stretched its unbeaten run to a European-record 39 games with the win over England. None of that was won in a Manchester City shirt, and none of it depended on the club’s reputation surviving its financial charges intact. Barcelona have no stake in how the Premier League case ends, and Rodri had every incentive to simply say nothing. He chose the opposite, repeatedly returning to the same defence of the people who built his career even as the club he built it with absorbed its heaviest disciplinary finding in years, one that will hang over City long after this international break ends.

For a club braced for the toughest verdict of the Guardiola era, that kind of voice from outside the building carries a different sort of value than any statement City’s own lawyers could put out. It came from someone with a Ballon d’Or on his shelf, a Barcelona badge on his chest, and nothing left to gain from saying any of it.