Gallery: Rodri’s FIFA World Cup triumph in pictures – World Cup trophy, Golden Ball, ring and more | OneFootball

Manchester City’s Rodri has completed one of the most remarkable comeback stories in the history of football, lifting the FIFA World Cup trophy with Spain and being crowned the tournament’s best player 12 months after returning from a long-term ACL injury.

The 30-year-old’s journey to the summit of world football in the summer of 2026 is one that will be told and retold for generations, with Spain’s extra-time victory in the World Cup final representing the crowning moment of a tournament career that has rarely, if ever, been matched by a midfielder in the modern era of the game.

Here are the best images of Rodri’s extraordinary FIFA World Cup triumph.

Scenes at full-time.

The moment it became real. Rodri holds the FIFA World Cup trophy in New York, completing a comeback from ACL surgery that few in football thought could end quite like this.

Rodri lifts the FIFA World Cup aloft with his teammates, bringing the curtain down on a historic campaign for La Roja, who conceded just once en route to their second World Cup title.

The Golden Ball lands in the right hands. Rodri joins the most exclusive club in football as the finest player at the 2026 FIFA World Cup – and it wasn’t particularly close.

The World Cup ring, presented to Rodri by FIFA president Gianni Infantino A piece of jewellery that tells the story of an entire tournament – and an entire career – in a single image.

La Roja. One last time, Rodri and his Spain teammates stand together as world champions. There will be many more nights like this for some of them. There may not be many more like this for him.

Spain’s captain for the occasion. Rodri led a squad of extraordinary talent through six games without losing a single one – and barely looked like losing any of them, either.

The man who makes the extraordinary look ordinary, one more time.

What Rodri’s World Cup triumph means for Man City – and for his legacy

Rodri’s tournament was not simply impressive – it was the kind of performance that rewrites what is thought to be possible from a footballer who had barely featured for his club in over a year following the ACL injury he sustained in September 2024 and the long, difficult road to rehabilitation that followed throughout the 2024-25 campaign.

Six games. A Golden Ball. A World Cup winner’s medal. And a ring to match. It is the kind of individual tournament that Zinedine Zidane managed in 1998, that Ronaldo delivered in 2002, and that Luka Modric approached in 2018 – and Rodri belongs in that company without qualification or caveat.

For Manchester City, the question that now hangs most prominently over the summer is one that the World Cup has only made more pressing: what happens next? Rodri’s contract at the Etihad Stadium runs until the summer of 2027, and the club are understood to have begun formulating their approach to extending his deal now that the tournament has concluded – a negotiation that will take place against the backdrop of Real Madrid’s persistent, if officially denied, interest in a player who has just added another piece of evidence to the case for his standing as the finest midfielder on the planet.

Director of football Hugo Viana and manager Enzo Maresca will have watched the last four weeks from afar with an emotion that sits somewhere between enormous pride and a very specific kind of anxiety – the anxiety of knowing that the player they are most desperate to keep has just made himself more desirable to every club on earth than he was before the tournament began. Whether the Etihad Stadium remains his home beyond the summer of 2027 is a question that neither the Golden Ball nor the World Cup ring can yet answer.