The Influence of Rodri vs. His Liverpool Equivalent

Manchester City will miss Rodri hugely this season. His influence for the Premier League champions is enormous. Do Liverpool have anybody of similar value?

“I really think it's something that worries us. We are the guys who suffer… If people want to see better football, then we need to rest." RODRI

“What we want is to give our best for the football, if you are tired you cannot compete at a high level.” ALISSON BECKER

“Players are repeatedly saying that enough is enough, and this must now act as a serious wake up call to the authorities.” THE PFA

The three quotes here were all reported in a single story less than a month ago. Opta Analyst published an article on player workloads earlier today, it’s a hot topic. Since the above lines were uttered, most people’s pick for the best midfielder in the world has seen his season ended before it really began. The top goalkeeper in the game then suffered an injury which will keep him out until after the November international break.

Too much football, anyone? Not for the money men. Tough luck, players, or anyone who wants to watch high quality matches rather than zombified athletes stumbling around. There’s another game to play today, tomorrow, sometime, always.

Manchester City have unfortunately been handed the opportunity to experience what Liverpool went through in 2020/21. The Reds lost Virgil van Dijk for the season early in that campaign. The cost was not limited to a player who truly merits the indefinable description of world class either.

His positional colleagues were then overplayed, eventually suffering long-term injuries themselves. Jürgen Klopp was left with a central-defensive partnership of Fabinho and Jordan Henderson for the visit of City in a deserted stadium. It was no surprise when they got their biggest win at Anfield since the 1930s. No matter how good Pep Guardiola’s side undoubtedly is, it is inevitable that the loss of Rodri will catch up with them eventually.

Perhaps it already has. City lost the expected goal score by the widest margin of their 50-game home unbeaten run last weekend, although they won the game 3-2. No matter that Fulham have started 2024/25 well, nobody would’ve anticipated them posting the joint-second best non-penalty xG difference a visiting team has inflicted at the Etihad in the last seven years.

Image via: https://theanalyst.com/eu/2024/10/manchester-city-win-despite-xg-deficiency

We can’t assign this underlying statistical outcome entirely to the absence of Rodri. City’s starting XI are collectively paid about three times more than their Fulham counterparts, a simple yet effective way of assessing player quality, so they would have still expected to dominate proceedings easily enough.

But as I recently discussed in an episode of the Distance Covered podcast, it is possible to use expected goal numbers to assess how a team performs with or without any of their players. In this regard, Rodri almost stands alone.

His influence has grown year-on-year since he moved to England. FBRef carries data on how a team’s xG difference compares between when a player is on the pitch and when they are absent. City have grown steadily better in his presence with each passing season.

These figures are truly remarkable. Across the half decade in question, City’s expected goal difference worked out at 1.31 per 90 minutes. For the 81.6 per cent of the time that Rodri was playing, the Cityzens were 1.38 xG per 90 better than their opponents.

The difference initially sounds small. But for the total average to drop thanks to the time he missed, City’s xGD was 1.02 per 90 in that period. Again, how much rests on a single player is clearly questionable. Nonetheless, the reigning Premier League champions - since 2021, unfortunately - have been 0.36 per 90 better in Rodri’s presence.

For any team, this would be huge. For City? Wow. In 2019/20, they had the best xGD. In 2020/21, they had the best xGD. In 2021/22, they had the best xGD. In 2022/23, they had the best xGD. In 2023/24, there was an incident with Arsenal. But even so; no-one died.

An Opta-defined big chance is worth an average of 0.38 expected goals once we strip out penalties. Rodri has been worth near enough one of those every full match to what has been unquestionably the strongest team over his five years in England.

The influence has been split (rounding errors notwithstanding) at 0.29 to 0.06 in terms of difference to xG against and for respectively, as you’d expect for a defensive midfielder. Again, the Spaniard is making that difference at the back for a team which tends to give away very little to their opponents anyway.

Best of all, from the angle of a scientific experiment, City’s expected goal difference per match in 2024/25 is 0.32 worse than it was last season. Never mind that it’s almost certainly a coincidence, the value of Rodri lies writ large in the Cityzens’ data.

If we wish to compare the influence of the City man with the Liverpool squad across the last five seasons, it’s telling that only Trent Alexander-Arnold and Mohamed Salah can match him for league minutes. Some of that will be down to Reds players coming or going between the summers of 2019 and 2024, but Rodri wasn’t joking about being overplayed.

What we do have is 19 Reds who featured for at least one season’s worth of minutes across the last five completed campaigns. Here’s the difference they made to the expected goal difference across the seasons in which they featured.

Virgil van Dijk and Salah have better figures than Rodri. They were older players who were established in the team prior to the start of this period, so had advantages over the City man in that respect. Playing for a worse team, at least according to expected goal difference, also offers more room in which to help the data improve.

As already intimated, Liverpool’s statistical dip in 2020/21 wasn’t down to their Dutch centre-back’s absence alone. His injury was merely the first domino in the run of unfortunate events. It’s reasonable to assume the catalogue of misfortune helped scupper the numbers of the other players that season, as many of them are at the wrong end of the above table.

As relevant as that is, it didn’t seem to affect Salah. The data implies Liverpool had a pair of Rodris over the last five years. Their agents might want to bring this fact to Richard Hughes’ attention in the next few months.