When Rodrygo Goes scored the winning goal in the Copa del Rey final against Osasuna on Saturday night, he headed to one corner, embraced his teammates and then made an i with his fingers. Few spotted it and fewer understood the meaning, at least not yet, but somewhere in that sea of white where everyone was going wild was a small boy sitting alongside his dad who knew. Down there on the pitch, it was his celebration the Brazilian was doing.
Ignacio is eight and has just completed a cycle of chemotherapy as he recovers from Hodgkin’s disease. Rodrygo had first spoken to him in February through a charity called Juegaterapia dedicated to children with cancer, and had been to see him two days before the final, challenging him to a game of Fifa on the console. Ignacio had warned Rodrygo he was going to get beaten and when he scored, the i followed. Now it was Rodrygo’s turn.
“This is for Ignacio,” Rodrygo revealed afterwards. By then, the winger had a winner’s medal round his neck and the man of the match award in his hands. He had scored twice to take Madrid to a 2-1 victory, securing the only trophy he hadn’t won there, collection complete at 22. The winner came with 20 minutes to go, the opener after only 106 seconds. He’s always been fast: Rodrygo signed for Madrid for €45m at 17, although he didn’t go until he was 18, got his first goal 94 seconds into his La Liga bow, faster than any debutant in the club’s history, and scored four minutes into his first European night at the Santiago Bernabéu.
His cup debut brought him a goal after 14 minutes and he scored on his Club World Cup debut too. That though was on 92 minutes and if the early goals have been good, it’s the late ones he holds most fondly and for which he is best remembered, or was until Saturday. There is something about the rescue missions that seem made for him; sent on to save them, it is as if he has innate sense of timing, occasion, which may even have worked against him.
A winner against Internazionale comes to mind, last season his volley pulled Madrid into extra time against Chelsea and then of course there was that. Asked on Saturday whether this was the best night of his career, Rodrygo immediately said no, “nothing compares to City” – and how could it? “We were dead, nobody believed,” he recalled, but then goals in the 90th and 91st minutes brought them back.
For Rodrygo, there is something about the cups – this Copa del Rey run started with his brilliant strike dragging struggling Madrid through at tiny Cacereno and he scored an absurd equaliser to take them into extra time against Atlético Madrid – especially in Europe. Madrid’s top scorer in the Copa del Rey this season, he has more Champions League goals in 37 games than in 104 in the league, 15 against 13. His minutes-per-goal record is revealing: every 121 in the Champions League, 131 in the cup, 433 in the league. Across those he scores and sets up, he has been directly involved in a Champions League goal every 74 minutes. “I don’t know how to explain it, what happens to me in these competitions,” he said. “Good things always happen to me in the Champions League.”
In part that statistic is a product of which minutes he has played, precisely that feel for the moment, that idea of him as a footballer who comes on and changes games. That can be a problem too: his debut was almost four years ago and it is only now he appears to be becoming a fixture. This time last year, Rodrygo wouldn’t – didn’t – start a semi-final against Manchester City, Carlo Ancelotti having found Fede Valverde a hybrid role. Two months ago, he might not have done. Now, although far from guaranteed, the expectation is he will. Either way, he will be introduced, form and history here suggesting there will be an impact.
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Rodrygo is young, polite and understated, which is one reason it has taken him so long to become a regular. He would like to be a No 10, which is another: the role doesn’t really exist in the Madrid team. He likes the left too, but Vinícius Júnior is there. And he has played at false 9, but only when Karim Benzema has been absent. It has taken a while for a place to be grasped alongside both, playing on the right. “An elegant player developing in a spectacular way”, as Ancelotti called him after the cup final, he has been a victim of the desire to bolster the midfield and his own qualities, that feel for the moment.
“Sometimes I don’t play him because that way I have another way of changing a game,” Ancelotti admitted in February. “It’s not that he doesn’t deserve a place, but because that way I have an option. He allowed us to win the Champions League from the bench.” In the final last year Rodrygo had to approach the coach in the final minutes to remind him of a promise to play him, reward for what he had done. He went on in minute 93.
That hasn’t always been easy to accept. Rodrygo admitted that Luka Modric had told him to stay calm when he wasn’t getting the games he wanted and, taken off against Villarreal in January, he walked to the bench without acknowledging Ancelotti, an act all the more notable because it was unexpected. His camp said he just hadn’t seen the coach, but Ancelotti turned to him and demanded: you shake my hand.
It is different now, possibly even a transition towards a regular role, earned by performances of an extraordinary level lately. More opportunities to play, sometimes through absences, mean more opportunities to make a case to start, the whole thing self-perpetuating. This is a point Rodrygo makes repeatedly, if quietly, gently. “Whenever I play more I can get close to those numbers; now I am playing all the time, the manager is trusting in me so it is normal to score more goals, give more assists and play better,” he said after the cup final.
He has started eight times in Europe, including both games against Chelsea – he scored twice at Stamford Bridge – and he has started 11 of the past 13 league games when available. A word of warning though: the two he didn’t were Barcelona, against whom he came on and scored, and Atlético, the nagging suspicion lingering that on the biggest nights he could yet be recast as the man to rescue them. He has six league goals and nine assists, 16 goals in all competitions compared with nine, two and seven in the previous three seasons. The two most recent won Madrid the cup and fulfilled a promise, delivering an i for Ignacio.
“It’s a special night,” Rodrygo said afterwards, “now we rest and on Tuesday we have the most important game of the season. We always want more.”
