Rodri Set for Barcelona Medical as Manchester City Accept £65.4m Bid From La Liga Champions

Rodri is set to undergo a medical at Barcelona ahead of completing a £65.4m move from Manchester City, ending a transfer saga that stretched across the entire summer window. The Spain international is expected to sign a four-year contract with the La Liga champions.

Rodri made 298 appearances for City after joining from Atletico Madrid in 2019, adding two FA Cups and three League Cups to the trophies already mentioned. He travelled to Barcelona on Monday and is due to complete his medical on Tuesday, with the club expected to confirm the signing the same day and stage a formal presentation on Wednesday.

City had wanted the 30-year-old to stay and sign a new deal, with only a year left on his existing contract. Barcelona kept pushing anyway. An initial offer in the region of £40m was knocked back last week. A follow-up bid of £55m met the same fate. It took a third offer to change City’s mind, and that fee proved too good to turn down.

Rodri won the World Cup with Spain this summer and previously collected the Ballon d’Or. At City, he was part of four Premier League title wins and the 2023 Champions League triumph, scoring the winning goal in the final against Inter Milan in Istanbul. Few midfielders anywhere in Europe can point to a comparable run of team and individual honours across a single spell at one club, and City’s willingness to let him go this week says as much about Barcelona’s persistence as it does about a squad now being reshaped from the ground up under a new manager.

He missed City’s Community Shield defeat to Arsenal on Sunday, a 3-0 loss that marked Enzo Maresca’s first game in charge after he replaced Pep Guardiola. Rodri only returned to the club’s training ground on Friday after minor back surgery following the World Cup, and Maresca made his admiration for the player clear when asked about him afterwards. “All teams need a player like Rodri,” the Italian said.

The fee itself tells its own story about how City’s stance shifted over the course of a week. Barcelona’s opening approach was rejected outright as too low. Their second attempt fared no better. Only when the Spanish champions returned with a third and final proposal did City’s board decide the offer had become too significant to knock back again, even with a player of Rodri’s standing in the dressing room.

A Deal Nine Days in the Making

Barcelona moved for Rodri knowing exactly what they needed: a midfielder who could sit in front of the defence and dictate the tempo of a match without needing the ball to find him twice. His numbers back that reputation. Sky Sports News reporter Ben Ransom described the player’s importance to City in blunt terms.

“Rodri leaves a huge hole,” Ransom said. “We saw an aspect of that in the Community Shield, Manchester City lacking particularly in the centre of the pitch. Rodri would have made a huge difference. He was instrumental to what Manchester City did in 2022/23 when they won the treble. He scored the winning goal in the Champions League final to beat Inter Milan in Istanbul.”

Ransom pointed to the two seasons that followed the treble as proof of exactly how much City had come to depend on their midfielder. “From 2024 onwards, that injury in the final of the Euros really plagued him. Then he suffered the ACL injury early on in the 2024/25 season. Then we realised how critical he was to what Manchester City were doing. They had a massive hole in their midfield. When Rodri didn’t play, the conversation was Manchester City were not the same team. The way he is able to control a game is remarkable.”

That history makes City’s willingness to sell now notable. Maresca inherits a squad missing its most important defensive midfielder for a Premier League opener against Bournemouth in a week, with no like-for-like replacement signed yet.

Maresca’s Message to the Boardroom

City’s new manager used his post-Community Shield press conference to push the club toward faster business in the market. Central midfield sits at the heart of the rebuild. City already broke the British transfer record this summer to sign Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116m, and Anderson started in midfield at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff in Rodri’s absence.

City hold an interest in Lille’s Ayyoub Bouaddi as a possible long-term successor. Asked directly about the France youth international, Maresca kept his answer measured. “He’s still a Lille player,” he said. “But any new signing, any new player, for sure as soon as they arrive it’s better. Because we’re going to start the Premier League in one week. If they start to work with us as soon as possible, it’s better if they can also understand the way we need to play.”

The club also holds an interest in Chelsea’s Enzo Fernandez, though that pursuit hit a snag on Friday when City missed a deadline Chelsea had set for a £120m bid. Chelsea now expect Fernandez to stay in west London for the entirety of the 2026/27 season. Sky Sports News’ Alan Irwin explained why City were unmoved by the ultimatum.

“This was a deadline Chelsea imposed themselves and Man City were unlikely to play ball with a club imposing their own transfer deadlines,” Irwin said. “City boss Enzo Maresca is a big admirer of Enzo Fernandez. He understands exactly what he could bring to the club. But if the transfer is to come off it is very much dependent on if Rodri leaves Man City for Barcelona.”

With Rodri’s exit now agreed, that condition has been met. Whether City return for Fernandez before the September 2 deadline remains to be seen, though the funds freed up by the Rodri sale strengthen their hand.

Funding the Rebuild

Rodri’s sale is not the only outgoing deal shaping City’s midfield this summer. The club has also agreed to sell Tijjani Reijnders to Saudi Pro League side Al Qadsiah for a fee in the region of £51m. Reijnders joined City from AC Milan last summer and has made clear he wants the move, with a switch to Saudi Arabia now expected to go through.

Between the Reijnders sale and Rodri’s now-agreed exit, City stand to bring in more than £116m from two midfield departures in a single window, on top of the British record fee already spent on Anderson. It leaves Maresca with a squad in transition just a week before his Premier League bow, still shaped by decisions made before he arrived and now increasingly by his own priorities.

Anderson’s £116m arrival from Nottingham Forest was itself a statement of intent from a club moving on from the Guardiola era, and his display in Cardiff, deployed in central midfield in Rodri’s absence, offered an early glimpse of how Maresca plans to fill the gap in the short term. The longer-term answer looks set to come from Lille, from Chelsea, or from elsewhere in a window that closes on September 2 with City’s midfield still very much a work in progress.

A Rough Start in Cardiff

The Community Shield defeat offered an early look at life without Rodri. Arsenal took the lead inside 24 seconds through Riccardo Calafiori, the competition’s fastest goal in 58 years, a mark last set in 1968. Kai Havertz doubled the lead before Martin Ødegaard completed the scoring in the 48th minute. It stood as the joint-heaviest defeat for a City manager on his first game in charge, matched only by Harry Newbould’s 4-1 loss to Arsenal in 1906.

Jack Grealish came off the bench for his first City appearance in 15 months, but the afternoon belonged to Arsenal. Maresca refused to read too much into the scoreline. “In general I’m always concerned, even when we win games so imagine how concerned I am that we didn’t win the game,” he said. “It’s just the beginning, we have many things that we need to do better, I think the reaction was good after conceding the first goal and now try to reset and analyse the game and think from Tuesday about the next game.”

Rodri’s departure adds another layer to that rebuild. City open their Premier League campaign at home to Bournemouth in a week, with a midfield that has lost its most decorated player and gained a club-record signing still settling into a new system. Whatever arrives between now and September 2 will need to answer the question Maresca has faced from his first day in the job: how does a team replace the player who spent four years making Manchester City look inevitable.

For Barcelona, the calculation is simpler. A four-year deal for a 30-year-old World Cup winner and former Ballon d’Or holder gives Hansi Flick’s midfield a proven ball-winner and game manager at exactly the level the club has spent this window trying to reach. Rodri arrives with medals from four Premier League titles and a Champions League final winning goal already on his résumé, the kind of pedigree few midfielders on the market this summer could match. Barcelona’s persistence, three bids in the space of a week, reflected how highly the club rated the alternative of missing out entirely.