A reader poll run by the Spanish sports daily Marca has produced a lopsided verdict on this year's Ballon d'Or debate, ONE reports: 49 percent of respondents want Rodri to win it, more than double the 17 percent who backed his nearest challenger, Kylian Mbappé.
Marca put five names to its readers — Rodri, Lamine Yamal, Harry Kane, Lionel Messi and Mbappé — and the Manchester City and Spain midfielder ran away with it. The case for him, as the paper laid it out, is straightforward: Rodri captained Spain to the World Cup title this summer, was named the tournament's outstanding player, and did it while Spain conceded only a single goal across the entire competition.
Spain's run through the tournament ended with a 1-0 win over Argentina in the final, settled by a Ferran Torres goal deep into extra time — the country's second World Cup title, sixteen years after its first in 2010.
It was the second time in as many major tournaments that Rodri picked up the outstanding-player honour: he was also named Player of the Tournament at Euro 2024, when Spain beat England in the final in Berlin. Few midfielders anywhere have strung together two such displays back to back.
What makes the poll notable is how little of it has to do with his club form. Rodri missed roughly half of Manchester City's 2025-26 Premier League season through injury, returning to make only 21 league appearances and finishing the campaign without a trophy at club level — a sharp contrast to the midfield force who helped drive City to a treble two seasons earlier.
The root cause was the anterior cruciate ligament tear he suffered against Arsenal in September 2024, an injury that cost him the best part of a season and left Pep Guardiola managing his return carefully through 2025 as recurring soft-tissue setbacks slowed him down. By Marca's own account, Rodri needed roughly 18 months to work his way back to the level he showed for Spain this summer.
Rodri is not new to this stage. He already won the Ballon d'Or in 2024, edging out Vinícius Júnior in one of the tighter votes in the award's recent history. With the World Cup added to his collection, he has now won the World Cup, the European Championship, the Champions League and the Ballon d'Or — a combination only Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller and Zinédine Zidane had achieved before him.
The other names on Marca's list have credentials of their own. Messi, now 39, captained Argentina back to a World Cup final and collected the Silver Ball as the tournament's second-best player; Mbappé topped the scoring charts at both club and international level and picked up the Bronze Ball; Yamal continued the remarkable rise that has made him one of the sport's biggest young stars for both Barcelona and Spain; and Kane's case rests on another prolific season in front of goal for Bayern Munich. But in Spain, for now, none of it has dented the sense that the World Cup settled the argument.
None of this decides anything by itself — the Ballon d'Or is voted on by journalists, not newspaper readers, and the shortlist and ceremony are still months away. But as an early read on how Rodri's World Cup has shifted the conversation in his own country, Marca's numbers are hard to ignore.
