Rodri on the FaceTime habit Agüero and Otamendi hated

The habit that started as homesickness

When Rodri joined Manchester City from Atlético Madrid, his wife stayed behind in Spain while he settled into English football alone. Plenty of players in that position lean on teammates, nights out, or just time. Rodri leaned on his phone. After every single match, win or lose, he FaceTimed her, often before he had even left his seat on the team bus.

That is not unusual behaviour for a young player adjusting to a new country. What made it a story worth telling years later is the contrast between how it looked after a win and how it looked after a defeat.

Why the loss video calls were the problem

After a win, Rodri's calls blended into the noise. The bus was loud, teammates were celebrating, nobody was listening to one midfielder debrief his evening to his partner back home. Nobody cared, because there was nothing to care about.

A defeat changed the acoustics completely. City's bus, like most dressing rooms after a bad result, went quiet. Heads down, silence, the kind of mood where nobody wants to hear anything at all. Into that silence, Rodri would be narrating his own performance down the phone: honest, flat, matter-of-fact assessments of a game the whole squad was trying not to think about for twenty minutes. It is an easy picture to imagine: one voice cutting through a bus full of players stewing on a loss, loud enough that it became impossible to ignore.

Why Agüero and Otamendi were the ones to step in

It fell to Sergio Agüero and Nicolás Otamendi, the dressing room's senior Argentinians, to tell him to knock it off. The detail that makes the story land is that Pep Guardiola could apparently hear every word too, which turned a private phone call into a shared embarrassment for the whole bus. Agüero and Otamendi weren't being unkind. They were doing what senior players do with a younger teammate who hasn't yet learned the unwritten rules of a dressing room: somebody has to tell him, and it is almost always the ones who have been there longest.

There is a layer under the joke worth noting. Rodri has said Agüero was a childhood idol, someone he watched training at Atlético Madrid as a boy of twelve. Ending up as teammates, with Agüero comfortable enough to tease him on a team bus, is the kind of detail that tells you how far Rodri had already travelled by the time he arrived at City as a signing with serious expectations attached.

What it says about settling into a superclub

The anecdote works because it captures something true about elite dressing rooms that rarely gets described this plainly: new players don't just adapt to a system or a city, they adapt to etiquette. City in that era was stacked with senior pros who had already won the trophies Rodri was chasing, and the fastest way to be accepted wasn't necessarily performing on the pitch. It was learning when to put the phone down.

Rodri went on to become one of the most important midfielders City has had, and eventually a Ballon d'Or winner. But the story he chose to tell about his first year there wasn't about a goal or a trophy. It was about being quietly told, by two Argentinians who had seen it all before, to stop talking to his wife on the bus.