Spain midfielder Rodri said he is focused on the World Cup and will only address his future at Manchester City after the \u200btournament.<\/p>\n
The 2024 Ballon d’Or winner is entering the final year \u200cof his contract with the Premier League club and has been linked with a move to Real Madrid.<\/p>\n
“Well, I\u2019m trying not to make too much of it, \u200bbut it is part of my job, especially when a player \u200bhas been nearing the end of his contract for some \u2060time \u2013 it\u2019s only natural that names come up,” the 29-year-old told \u200breporters on Monday.<\/p>\n
“But anyway, I\u2019m very calm, I know exactly where I \u200bstand, and yes probably if there hadn\u2019t been a World Cup, I might be in a different situation now but with a World Cup on the horizon, \u200bmy responsibility is to stay focused.<\/p>\n
“We’re here to talk about the World \u200bCup and everything that concerns my future, I’ll wait until the end of the \u200cWorld \u2060Cup.”<\/p>\n
European champions Spain will face Cape Verde, Saudi Arabia and Uruguay in Group H at the June 11 to July 19 tournament in North America.<\/p>\n
Rodri said he had urged his Spain teammates to follow tennis \u200bgreat Rafa Nadal’s example \u200bafter watching \u2060a documentary about the 22-times Grand Slam champion.<\/p>\n
“What I told them is that we need to try to \u200bplay without the ball like a small team. With \u200bthat mindset \u2060of not thinking you\u2019re the best,” he added.<\/p>\n
“I was just watching the documentary on Nadal and he was always talking about that always one \u2060more ball, \u200bone more effort. And that\u2019s what the \u200bgreat champions do and, above all, bringing out all the talent this team has, which \u200bis very big.”<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22744,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-36044","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"","published_date":null,"news_description":"","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/36044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/36044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36123,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/36044\/revisions\/36123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=36044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}