The best player in the Premier League? Look deeper.
Pep Guardiola would probably admit in an unguarded moment that he has a slight tendency to exaggerate. With wide eyes and breathless voice, he will sing the praises of a hopelessly outmatched opponent who his Manchester City team has just beaten 6-1, while his players’ jerseys are unstained by sweat. ‘Boys,’ he’ll say, ‘boys, they’re so good. So so good.”
Where this reflex comes from is a matter of interpretation. The most likely explanation is that Guardiola is exactly who he is: passionate, intense and deeply enthusiastic, still, about his sport. There may also be a touch of noblesse oblige, a bit of well-intentioned clemency from football’s great conqueror. And it’s easy to wonder whether Guardiola resents how much of his success – and City’s – is presented as an economic inevitability, and therefore feels the need to get his rebuttal first.
Whatever the truth, the effect is the same: sometimes it can be difficult to be absolutely certain when Guardiola is being sincere and indulging in some light lily gilding.
For example, in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s Manchester derby, he suggested that Phil Foden might be the ‘best’ player in the Premier League. It is by no means an outrageous claim. Foden, 24, has been excellent for City this season, the best season of his young career. He has shone in a range of roles and deserves a fair share of the credit for the fact that City didn’t really seem to miss Kevin De Bruyne when he was injured.
But at the same time, there is a good chance that Guardiola was exaggerating, just a touch. Not because he doesn’t appreciate Foden’s brilliance, but because he – more than anyone else – needs to be aware that Foden isn’t even the best player on his team. The best player at Manchester City and the best player in the Premier League is Rodri.
He is the only person to complete City. He is the only player for whom Guardiola does not have a plug-and-play replacement. If Foden is unavailable, City can always shuffle their glittering deck and deploy Jeremy Doku, Jack Grealish, Julián Álvarez or Bernardo Silva, the game’s pre-eminent Swiss Army knife, in his place.
But without Rodri in midfield, Guardiola’s team has somehow become smaller. The numbers confirm that. When the Spaniard is present, as he was in a potentially decisive meeting with Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday, City simply do not lose.
The last time Rodri played and Manchester City lost was in February 2023. Since then, he has played in 60 games. In none of these cases has he tasted defeat. The common thread in all of City’s defeats this season – against Wolves, Arsenal and Aston Villa – has been Rodri’s absence.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Most fans – both of City and his rivals – are well aware of Rodri’s significance, and not just because of his helpful habit of scoring crucial goals in high-stakes matches. He is a leading candidate to win at least one of the individual awards that grace the Premier League season, the Player of the Year awards presented by fans, writers and the players themselves.
And yet it seems at best counter-intuitive and at worst downright pretentious to label him, a defensive midfielder, as the ‘best’ player in the league.
Partly, of course, that’s because the word itself isn’t very helpful in the context of sports as a whole. Is the best player the one with the most talent? Is it the one that has the biggest impact, or the highest output? Or is it, as Guardiola probably meant with Foden, the one who is the most in shape?
But that lack of clarity is also a testament to the fact that we tend to value skills that we can easily see, understand and (increasingly) quantify over skills that are a little harder to identify. For a generation of fans raised on fantasy leagues and video games, where points are won and decisions are made based on a player’s stats, the fact that no one has better numbers than Erling Haaland settles the debate.
In an age when everything is broadcast – and even that which is not clipped and shared, bite-sized and edible, online – it is possible to attach an aesthetic value to the sight of Foden sliding past a defender with a flick of the shoulder and movement of the hips, to see how he exerts his gentle command over an obedient ball and claims that he is the most gifted.
Rodri’s skills are not well suited to those meters. His passing is of course flawless and is both visible and quantifiable, but the way he controls space, or plays at the pace of a game, is much harder to measure.
Most complicated of all, however, is the fact that Rodri’s genius fails to make things happen, like Haaland or Foden. He is being deployed, at least in part, to ensure that this does not happen.
Of course, that’s always been the problem, not just for defensive midfielders, but for defenders and goalkeepers of all stripes: the brain is hardwired to give more weight to things it can see than to things it can’t.
A defender’s success lies in making things hypothetical, and it’s difficult to base a concrete judgment – the kind of judgment needed to claim someone is the best at what he or she does – on goals scored have not been scored. But these are all talents, who have no less influence on the outcome of football matches than Haaland’s finishing or Foden’s technique. They just aren’t treated as such.
This season has provided a perfect illustration of why those biases are worth correcting. Liverpool’s relatively unlikely challenge for the Premier League title has been built in large part on the tenacity of centre-back Virgil van Dijk and, before the injury that will ensure his absence against City this weekend, goalkeeper Alisson Becker. Both lay claim to the title of best player in the Premier League. Neither is described as such.
Arsenal, hoping to claim its first league title in 20 years, has built its recent form as much on its reckless attacking – it is the first team to score five or more goals in three consecutive away games in English history – and a particularly stingy defense . Manager Mikel Arteta will know from the bitter experience of last year how damaging an injury to William Saliba, Gabriel or now Declan Rice would be.
It would be unfair to pretend that these are the players whose contributions to a game make the heart flutter. It is, and will always be, the likes of Haaland and Foden who cast the most dazzling spells, who fill the stadiums and sell the broadcast contracts, who keep the crowds on the edge of their seats. After all, what they do can feel like the purest, cleanest manifestation of talent: a kind of magic, something otherworldly and inexplicable.
But there are many different types of talent and many different ways to be the best. What Van Dijk and Alisson and especially Rodri do may not be as exciting, pulsating or delicate as scoring a goal, but that should not diminish its value. After all, what’s more magical than making something disappear?
Last chance sedan
No team cherishes the Champions League as much as Real Madrid. No team has an identity so intertwined with what was once the European Cup. And so it was perhaps not surprising to see Real Madrid do their best to alleviate the boredom that had set in this year’s round of 16 by doing their best to be knocked out by RB Leipzig this week. It failed, of course, but the effort was admirable.
Otherwise, it was a parade this week: Bayern Munich brushed aside Lazio, Paris St.-Germain flew past Real Sociedad, Manchester City soared through FC Copenhagen – “Boys, boys, they are so good” – it was all a testament to what The competition is like thoroughly dismantled by the elite and the financial inequality they have created.
The hope for a break with recent reality stems from next week’s matches – those between Inter Milan and Atlético Madrid and Barcelona and Napoli should both be convincing – and from the possibility of a more equal draw in the quarter-finals. As the stakes rise, the equations change: Bayern look at least something of a threat based on their experience alone. PSG’s talent and demob-happy atmosphere give the team under Luis Enrique a whimsical edge.
Of course, that may be grasping at straws, but it is in the interest of everyone involved that something unexpected happens, and quickly. The Champions League was supposed to be watchable by appointment, but this week – the past few weeks – have been intensely forgettable. And that poses a real problem for both the clubs and UEFA.