Six Rodri alternatives for Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid midfield: Zubimendi, TAA… | OneFootball

Rodri has joined Barcelona, which is about as bad as the news could get for Real Madrid and Jose Mourinho.

Not only have they missed out on the perfect solution to their midfield problem, but they’ve watched him join their most bitter rivals. What next?

We’ve picked out six alternatives for Real Madrid to consider after losing out on Rodri’s signature.

Martin Zubimendi

Xabi Alonso had reportedly identified Zubimendi, with whom he’d worked in Real Sociedad’s youth set-up, as the perfect candidate for Real Madrid’s midfield following the departures of Toni Kroos and Luka Modric.

Getting him a year later would be spectacularly petty, but you can’t rule that out when Florentino Perez

Zubimendi is arguably the most obvious Rodri alternative out there. He’s been Rodri’s understudy for Spain, and his excellent performances off the bench in the Euro 2024 and 2026 World Cup finals suggest he can perform the same role at the highest level.

The tricky bit would be prising him away from Arsenal. Zubimendi was solid without setting the world alight for much of his debut season.

Still, there was a sense that the physical demands of Premier League football eventually took their toll.

Being dropped for Myles Lewis-Skelly in the Champions League final perhaps hinted that a return to Spain could be on the cards sooner or later.

Manu Kone

Kylian Mbappe would surely vouch for the Roma midfielder, given his breakout performances for France at the World Cup.

He wouldn’t be a perfect Rodri analogue, but then again, how many players can replicate the skillset of a Ballon d’Or winner who was named the best player in both of Spain’s recent major tournament wins?

Kone could instead provide the mobility and combativeness to complement a more technical passer. Put him alongside someone like Bernardo Silva and, collectively, you could recreate much of what Rodri gives you individually.

But that’s the whole point: Rodri is the best midfielder in the world because he somehow does the job of two players in one. Madrid’s loss is Barcelona’s gain.

Enzo Fernandez

We’re thoroughly bored of the Enzo Fernandez saga at this point. Just move already.

The Argentinian has already fluttered his eyelashes in the direction of Madrid. He’d surely love nothing more than to escape the Premier League and getting roundly booed at every ground in the country. But, so far, Los Blancos have refused to flirt back.

He certainly feels like a better fit for Spanish football than English football, and an Argentine reunion with Cristian Romero at Atletico Madrid under Diego Simeone would be a match made in heaven.

You could easily imagine Jose Mourinho loving him, too. Quite how anyone comes up with the €120million required to get him out of Chelsea, though, is another matter.

He’s not exactly a like-for-like Rodri alternative, but the fact that Manchester City are eyeing him up to fill that void in their midfield is an endorsement of his credentials.

Angelo Stiller

It’s baffling that Stiller hasn’t got a big move away from Stuttgart yet, and is only making ripples in the rumour mills.

If you put faith in data, the 25-year-old Germany international might just be one of the best defensive midfielders in European football right now.

He doesn’t quite possess the glamour you associate with a club like Madrid, but then did Luka Modric when they signed him? Did Claude Makelele back in the day?

This is a club that does best when they counterbalance their star power with a sprinkling of understated brilliance in the engine room.

Aleix Garcia

Like Stiller, Garcia is hardly the sort of signing that would have Madrid fans dizzy. But after they’ve splashed over €100million on a shiny new attacker, perhaps a cheaper, more functional option in midfield wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Garcia isn’t a world-beater by any means, but he’s a Spain international, proven in La Liga, and at least fits the profile of what Madrid’s midfield is currently lacking.

Getting top players out of Bayer Leverkusen is a simple enough process, too, as we’ve seen with the fire sale of Xabi Alonso’s title-winning squad.

Trent Alexander-Arnold

We nearly spat out our cornflakes when we came across a report from Spanish radio station Cadena SER (via GOAL) suggesting that Mourinho is “banking on a surprise card” in midfield by planning on using Alexander-Arnold there. Yeah, right.

We’re taking that with a massive pinch of salt, but it’s not completely without logic. Obviously, Alexander-Arnold is not a defensive midfielder that can screen a backline.

But he has played in midfield before, and possesses a technical passing range that Madrid have badly lacked since Kroos and Modric left (although Bernardo Silva will surely help on that front).

Denzel Dumfries has arrived and looks much more to Mourinho’s liking as a defensively sound right-back, leaving an awkward question of where that leaves the former Liverpool man. Maybe elsewhere on the teamsheet?

One of Rodri’s great strengths is his ability to get his foot on the ball and control a game from the midfield.

Alexander-Arnold could conceivably help do that in the aggregate, if we’re to go all Moneyball, but he’d surely need a more physical and positionally disciplined presence alongside him.

A Trent-Aurelien Tchouameni pivot isn’t the worst idea in the world on paper. We’ll believe it when we see it, though.