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Rodri, el madrileño que eligió al FC Barcelona y llega para ganar la Champions

By CNN

El Balón de Oro del Mundial 2026 tiene nuevo equipo. Rodri Hernández, campeón con la selección española, ya es nuevo jugador del FC Barcelona, club que paga unos US$ 80 millones —según el portal especializado Transfermarkt— para sacarlo del Manchester City, donde ganó absolutamente todo: Premier League (varias), Copa de Inglaterra, Copa de la Liga, Supercopa de Europa, Mundial de Clubes (ahora Copa Intercontinental) y la tan ansiada Champions League.

De esta manera, Rodri vuelve al fútbol español, donde ha vestido las camisetas del Villarreal y el Atlético de Madrid, el club que lo catapultó al poderoso City, donde finalmente acabó por recibirse de futbolista total bajo la batuta de Pep Guardiola.

Rodri tuvo su bienvenida al FC Barcelona como una joven estrella que llega con todo un futuro brillante por delante, pero en realidad el mediocampista ya pasó la barrera de los 30 años. Lo que sucede es que el reconocimiento le llegó, quizás, algo tarde en su carrera.

Rodri tuvo sus inicios en las categorías juveniles del Rayo Majadahonda y el Atlético de Madrid, y su debut en primera división se dio con la camiseta del Villarreal en la temporada 2015/2016, aunque recién en la siguiente se ganó un lugar en el primer equipo. Tras dos años de muchos minutos, el Colchonero acordó su compra, pero fue tan bueno su desempeño que solo duró una temporada a las órdenes de Diego Simeone.

Su llegada al Manchester City se dio sin tantos bombos y con muchos menos platillos. Después de todo, ahí estaban Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva e Ilkay Gündogan. Sin embargo, Guardiola jamás dudo. Lo incluyó como titular desde su primer partido, en la base del mediocampo, en esa posición de pivote tan necesaria para la salida limpia y la construcción de juego del DT.

En la parte celeste de Manchester, Rodri se convirtió en leyenda. En silencio, fue el reloj del mediocampo del City. Jugó 298 partidos en total y ganó 13 títulos. El más importante de todos, la Champions League 2022/2023, donde quedó inmortalizado al marcar el gol (golazo) de la final ante el Inter de Milán.

Doce meses más tarde, a los 28 años, sorprendió a muchos al quedarse con su primer Balón de Oro, en una reñida votación que acabó por desatar un insólito boicot del Real Madrid ante los rumores que de Vinícius Jr. no ganaría el premio al mejor jugador de la temporada. Pero Rodri también lo merecía. Venía de ganar el Mundial de Clubes de 2023 y estaba muy fresco el título de la Eurocopa 2024 con la selección de España.

Ahora, después de un Mundial 2026 donde terminó siendo el mejor jugador de España en las instancias finales, nadie duda de que es firme candidato para ganar el premio por segunda vez en su carrera.

Rodri llega al FC Barcelona tras caerse las negociaciones con el Real Madrid. Los blancos fueron los primeros en ir a buscar al mediocampista que venía de quedarse sin Guardiola en el City, pero no hubo acuerdo y, paralelamente, el culé abrió negociaciones, estirando la billetera hasta donde pidieron los Citizens.

Sin embargo, más allá de la billetera catalana, Rodri no ocultó su felicidad por llegar al Barcelona, un club con el que comparte mayor afinidad por el estilo de juego. Seguramente se hubiera hecho eje del juego en el Real Madrid de Mourinho, pero la idea de Flick no necesita tiempo de adaptación y parece encajar como anillo al dedo. Este Barca juega como el City de Pep y como la España de De la Fuente, y el español tendrá la misión de repetir el juego que más le gusta: toque corto en salida, pases largos en los contragolpes y llegada por sorpresa al área rival.

En el Barca, además, será compañero de varios de los jugadores con los que ganó el Mundial hace un mes: con Pedri, Dani Olmo y Lamine Yamal podrá repetir buena parte del ataque que levantó la copa en Nueva Jersey ante Argentina. Le faltará Ferran Torres, claro, recientemente anunciado como nuevo jugador del Paris Saint-Germain.

El objetivo lo puso el propio Rodri al aterrizar en España: “¿A por la Champions? A por todo”.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

Pete Buttigieg returns to first-in-the-nation South Carolina with a fresh appeal to Black voters

By CNN
Orangeburg, South Carolina (CNN) — Pete Buttigieg has been to this small but historic city in South Carolina’s Midlands at least twice before, as an underdog presidential candidate in 2020 and then as the better-known transportation secretary under President Joe Biden in 2023.Now a private citizen eying a second White House bid, Buttigieg returned this weekend with renewed urgency, appealing to Black voters who have newly solidified influence in the 2028 nominating process and whom he failed to win over in his last presidential campaign.Buttigieg told party activists during a morning speech in Florence that Republicans were using redistricting as “the culmination of a generational project to dismantle Black representation.” He held a roundtable with students at a historically Black college where he discussed his idea of reparations for slavery. And during an evening speech to the storied NAACP branch here, he said President Donald Trump’s second term may feel all too familiar to activists who fought for civil rights in Orangeburg in the 1960s.“The mid-2020s does not represent our nation’s first experience with corruption and self-dealing, with bigotry and exclusion, with inequality and injustice, with undemocratic behavior or with political violence,” Buttigieg said, adding that prior struggles played out “not on some distant shore, but in places like Orangeburg.”With a midterm election looming where both parties are campaigning over the cost of living, Buttigieg chastised fellow Democrats whom he said prefer to prioritize economic concerns over tackling more fundamental questions about democracy. He argued that civil rights legends such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Jackson have shown that Americans “can — and we must — do both.”His trip to South Carolina, Buttigieg’s first since leaving the Biden administration, marked the beginning of a new phase of political maneuvering ahead of the next presidential election, with Buttigieg making a concerted effort to get in front of Black voters and demonstrating new bonafides from his transportation secretary tenure.It was also the first major visit by a potential 2028 candidate to the state since the Democratic National Committee voted on August 15 to keep it as the location for the first presidential primary in the nation, a nod to the political power of its large Black electorate.Buttigieg brushed off a question about his 2028 plans after his speech in Florence, telling reporters he is “totally focused on 2026.” But there were ample reminders of speculation about his next move on Saturday, including a scattering of homemade signs reading “PETE” and “2028” that sprung up when he took the stage. Surveying the enthusiastic crowd, he observed he should “come here more often.”One fan, 64-year-old retiree Karen Ench, wore a “Pete Buttigieg 2028” shirt to the speech. Contemplating his 2028 ambitions afterward, she said she thought he was “really taking it much more serious” and focusing on areas of improvement from 2020.A 2028 bid would undoubtedly start with higher expectations for the onetime mayor of South Bend, Indiana, compared to his first run.“The Pete Buttigieg of 2020 is not the Pete Buttigieg of 2026,” said Marlon Kimpson, a Black former state senator who backed Biden in the 2020 primary. “He has name recognition, he’s no longer introducing himself. I think people generally like Pete, and that’s a big deal in an open race because he starts out at a plus. But as we look at his economic agenda, just for the average South Carolinian, with emphasis on the African American community … and the political infrastructure he has deployed in our state, there will be questions with respect to those issues.”Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, despite winning the Iowa caucuses with a much Whiter demographic, came to an end in South Carolina, dogged by his weaknesses with Black voters. After powerful South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden and gave his flagging bid a shot of momentum that ultimately propelled him to the presidency, Buttigieg finished fourth in the Palmetto State and dropped out a day later.Biden received 61% support from Black voters in South Carolina, while Buttigieg got 3%, according to exit polls.Colleen Condon, a Charleston lawyer and longtime party activist who backed Buttigieg in 2020, said that “2020 is so hard to compare against” due to the unique circumstances of Clyburn’s support for Biden. Now, Condon, who is White, said, Democrats are “anxious for someone young and energetic” and noted Buttigieg would bring more experience to the 2028 race.“He has done a lot of work in the last eight years, (including) as secretary of transportation, in showing his ability to work on the federal level,” Condon said.‘What he’s actually done’In interviews across the state on Saturday, Black Democrats agreed Buttigieg’s experience as transportation secretary has distinguished him since he last sought their support. He played a high-profile role in promoting Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, visiting communities small and large across the country to announce funding for long-awaited projects.In Florence, Mattie Thomas, a member of the South Carolina Democratic Party executive committee, said she did not know about his time as mayor but now she sees him as “one of our best transportation secretaries.”“I think he’ll fare extremely well this go around because people, they’ve seen what he’s actually done,” Sandra Burgess Glover, a retired educator, said in Orangeburg as Buttigieg mingled with the dinner crowd before his speech.Buttigieg was showered with praise at the dinner for his June 2023 announcement in the city with Clyburn of a $23 million federal grant to better connect Orangeburg’s two HBCUs to downtown. Orangeburg Mayor Michael Butler prompted a standing ovation for Buttigieg when he brought up the project, calling it “a long time coming.”Deloris Frazier, a member of the Orangeburg County Council, embraced Buttigieg as he worked the crowd before the dinner, telling him that she keeps a photo in her home of the two of them from that day in 2023. She told CNN afterward that she’d support Buttigieg for president if he ran, joking that she would take the photo and “just blow it up and make it bigger.”Earlier Saturday, Buttigieg visited one of Orangeburg’s HBCUs, Claflin University, and held an hourlong roundtable with about 20 students. The conversation topics ranged from artificial intelligence to reparations for slavery, which was a litmus test in the 2020 primary.Buttigieg said he still supported legislation to create a commission to study reparations. But he said he learned as transportation secretary that the federal government could take “reparative” steps sooner, pointing to his efforts to combat decades-old urban planning that led to highways cutting across Black neighborhoods.“I have a perspective on that that I didn’t have before when I didn’t have a chance to work on federal policy,” Buttigieg said.Usir Jackson, the president of the Student Government Association, said afterward he found Buttigieg “down to earth” and “authentic.”Buttigieg, who took notes at some points, appeared moved when the roundtable topic turned to young voters feeling disillusioned – and Jackson shared why he still makes sure to vote.“I do it to respect people who came before me,” Jackson said, “so I could vote.”Hurdles remain with Black votersFor all the praise of his record in the Biden administration, some of Buttigieg’s admirers acknowledge he needs it to translate into far more Black voter support than he saw in 2020.While the crowd he spoke to in Orangeburg was overwhelmingly Black, the audience that came to see him earlier in the day in Florence, at the state Democratic Party’s Spratt Issues Conference, was mostly White.State Rep. JA Moore was a crucial Black supporter for Buttigieg in 2020 in South Carolina, backing him after then-California Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out. Moore said in an interview that any potential 2028 candidate needs to focus less on tailoring a message to Black voters and more on developing a “cadence” of regularly reaching out to them where they are.“What we call it is the difference between a ‘come here’ and a ‘been here,’” Moore said. “I think one of the things people missed about Joe Biden – he was a ‘been here’ in the sense that he had been coming to South Carolina for over 40 years.”Some Black Democrats said he may continue to face hurdles in the state as a gay man, an issue that came up in 2020 as he reached out to socially conservative church congregations. “This is the Bible Belt,” Thomas said matter-of-factly.“Sometimes they want to categorize a candidate or individual because of their sexual preferences,” said Brenda Montgomery, a 67-year-old training specialist from Lake City who saw Buttigieg in Florence. “But for me, he is everyone. He represents everyone, and I really like him as a person because he is approachable.”Buttigieg, whose crowd in Florence was dotted with some small rainbow flags, does not go out of his way to talk about his sexual orientation. But on Saturday, he spoke regularly about his two children, who are mixed-race, that he adopted with his husband, Chasten, noting fatherhood is the biggest personal change he has experienced since 2020.It’s a life change that would be put to the test by another grueling presidential campaign, which South Carolina Democrats see as likelier than ever. While he mostly avoided talk of 2028, he said in Florence that he was excited about South Carolina’s first-in-the-nation status and how it would spotlight the state’s diversity.Buttigieg has fielded the 2028 speculation by becoming one of the most prolific endorsers in the midterms, with an eye on supporting Black Democrats and Democrats running in Republican-leaning territory. He kicked off his South Carolina trip on Friday night by headlining a fundraiser in Charleston for Nancy Lacore, a retired Navy officer running for an open House seat in a district that Trump carried by 13 percentage points in 2024.Condon, the Democratic activist who helped host Buttigieg’s fundraiser for LaCore, said it was “extremely early, but I’m very inclined to” support Buttigieg again in 2028 if he runs.Moore said it was too early for endorsements but said he especially likes Buttigieg for at least one reason.Buttigieg “has the ability to learn and adapt,” Moore said. “I find that refreshing and appealing.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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