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The Euro 2024 final can be cast as a showdown between two playmakers of England and Spain who differ in styles and can each write the story of which nation will end as the continent’s champion on Sunday.
Phil Foden is the firefly maestro of the half-turn who drifts between the front and midfield lines to prompt and trigger England’s attacking play. Rodri is a deeper-lying metronome who initiates Spain forays from near to the rearguard and then pads forward to continue knitting the team pattern.
Foden and Rodri, forward-thinking by instinct, are not defensive destroyers, though as graduates of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City they are schooled in how winning the ball is as precious as using it, and so press the opponent incessantly.
As teammates for five years, they know each other’s game intimately and have decorated countless scintillating City displays, and because their zones overlap they are likely to engage in more direct combat at the Olympiastadion than if each were, say, a No 6 or No 8. This duel within the main event will fascinate and may feature the odd flare-up because although these top-class talents coast through games serenely, each harbours a competitive edge that can spill into spikiness.
Their paths under Guardiola have differed. Rodri, on arrival from Atlético Madrid in the summer of 2019, as a then club record £62.8m buy, went straight into the starting XI and has remained an automatic starter. His import was illustrated when Guardiola, bafflingly, dropped him from the 2021 Champions League final against Chelsea in Porto. Lacking Rodri’s Cary Grant-like cool in the frantic midfield traffic City were unbalanced, and Thomas Tuchel’s side punched holes in them, notably in the back-to-front sequence that created Kai Havertz’s winner.
Contrastingly, Foden established himself as another of Guardiola’s main men only last season. In the 2022-23 treble campaign, his was a bit-part role of 2,260 minutes and 29 starts in all competitions, being on the bench for the 2-1 FA Cup final victory over Manchester United and the 1-0 Champions League final triumph over Inter the following week.
He entered in each to claim winner’s medals while Rodri played every minute and was the star turn in Istanbul, his 68th-minute strike that sealed the treble an apt picture of the Madrid-born schemer because the shot that beat André Onana was akin to one of his slide-rule passes.
In the two finals Foden was kept out of the side by Kevin De Bruyne, who he replaced in each. If the Belgian had not gone down with a serious hamstring injury 28 minutes into City’s season opener at Burnley last August, Foden might not have ended it as the Football Writers’ Association footballer of the year and the Professional Footballers’ Association player of the year, after the campaign of his career, which featured 27 goals.
With De Bruyne out until January, Foden seized his chance, proving to Guardiola he can consistently turn matches: a quaint requirement for a player who, when the season started, was 23, almost six years on from his debut and whose CV showed five Premier League titles, two FA Cups, four League Cups, the Champions League and the Uefa Super Cup. Another title and the Fifa Club World Cup (Foden scored in the 4-0 final win over Fluminense) were added to this honours roll, yet while Foden was finally establishing himself, Rodri felt so comfortable under Guardiola that, after April’s 3-3 draw at Real Madrid, he admitted fatigue, stating a desire to be rotated. “I do need a rest,” he said. “It is something we are planning.”
At that juncture Rodri’s 3,498 minutes for City were second only to Foden’s 3,560. The 28-year-old was left out of the following Sunday’s 5-1 dismantling of Luton (hardly a formidable foe) then reinstated. The declaration also stemmed, surely, from Rodri’s knowledge of being the one irreplaceable component in Guardiola’s gilded team, as the two-year nightmare endured at City by Kalvin Phillips, the player bought to compete with him, illustrated.
Rodri, for City and Spain, is peerless. Foden does not (yet) enjoy the same status either for City, where De Bruyne remains, or for England, where Jude Bellingham or Cole Palmer (his replacement who set up Ollie Watkins’ semi-final winner against the Netherlands) are also string pullers. Kobbie Mainoo is another who can shape a contest for Gareth Southgate’s men: a classic midfielder who carries the ball like Foden and can weave a contest together like Rodri.
But on Sunday the tussle for supremacy between Philip Walter Foden and Rodrigo Hernández Cascante may define the victor of the 17th European Championship. Foden, after his finest England display in Wednesday’s 2-1 semi-final victory, is primed.
“The last two games have been improvements [for me], the position is helping to get on the ball and get in dangerous areas,” he says. “I enjoyed it, picking up spaces, I looked more like myself like I do for City, finding myself on the edge of the box and getting shots away. I’m enjoying my football.”
