On Monday, Rayo Vallecano released James Rodríguez on a free transfer. It hadn’t been much of a stay. In four and a half months at the club, he managed 136 minutes of league football. Only once did he start in La Liga. Rodríguez is 33 now. Since he left Everton in 2021, he has started just 37 league games and scored only 10 goals. This is the sixth season in a row in which he has been released on a free transfer as he has drifted from Real Madrid to the team currently 12th in the table, via Qatar, Greece and Brazil. The sense is of a waning career nearing its end.
And yet in those three and a half years since his last game for Everton, Rodríguez has played 32 times for Colombia. While at Rayo, he has played 374 international minutes. True, he doesn’t often last a full game, but there are few other indications of decline. As Colombia reached the final of last year’s Copa América, he was named player of the tournament. His is a career that seems to run on two parallel tracks: at club level he is a fading star, a player who perhaps never quite lived up to his potential. But at international level, while in the autumn of his career, he remains a maestro.
While many players seem to resent international duty, it feels that, for Rodríguez, club football is a means to an end, a way of securing a wage and top-class training facilities to keep him sharp for the real business of playing for Colombia. It has increasingly come to seem that he is a player out of time.
Imagine if Rodríguez had been born not in 1991 but 1961. He could have been one of those great playmakers of the late 80s and early 90s, feeding two or three forwards who ran off him, protected by a midfield shield behind. There would have been no expectation on him to track back and chase and press. He could have been a Ricardo Bochini, a Dragan Stojkovic, a Théophile Abega … That said, if he had been, he would have been contesting his place in the Colombia national team with Carlos Valderrama, and doing so at a time when the great Pacho Maturana was introducing pressing, his own interpretation of the Dutch approach, “Fordism” – as systems play used to be dismissed in South America – to Colombian football.
International football increasingly feels a different form of the game from the club game, not as sophisticated, not as precise or as guided by complex data and pressing schema, perhaps not such high quality, but no less appealing as a result. It remains a world less governed by systems, in which individuals can shine, a world in which it’s still the players who can be heroes, rather than executives and sporting directors, boffins and set-piece coaches, a world in which Lionel Messi can still fulfil his destiny by winning a World Cup almost single-handed.
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Even at the Copa América, Rodríguez wasn’t operating as a classic No 10. He played on the right, drifting infield into more central positions behind Jhon Córdoba and Luis Díaz, with Daniel Muñoz offering width from right-back (until he was suspended for the final, which was lost) and protection offered by three mobile and aggressive midfielders. But as with Messi at the World Cup, that was enough.
It’s not that Rodríguez never involves himself in defensive actions – he actually made nine interceptions and tackles in the tournament, which is nine more than Messi – more that he cannot be relied upon to do so, that his search for the space from which he can expose the opposition’s vulnerabilities means he cannot always diligently be covering the opposing full-back.
His own team must compromise to cover and while it’s not impossible at club level, it’s far easier to accommodate an unreliable defensive presence in the more basic environment of international football. For Rayo this season, Rodríguez made a total of four tackles and interceptions, fewer than he did in a single Copa América group game against Brazil.
And yet for all but Colombians, the sense must be of a talent unfulfilled. I confess a bias here: I was at the Maracanã in the 2014 World Cup when, 25 yards from goal, he took Álvaro Pereira’s header on his chest, turned and volleyed a shot in off the underside of the crossbar to give Colombia the lead against Uruguay. Such things are subjective, of course, and much is down to the precise angle from which you see it and your state of mind at the time, but it’s probably the best goal I’ve ever seen live.
Rodríguez was 22 and playing for Monaco. He had already won three league titles with Porto and inspired Banfield to their only Argentinian title (something they couldn’t quite manage even when they supposedly had the backing of Evita Perón). He won the Golden Boot at that World Cup and seemed a genuine world star in the making. Later that summer he joined Real Madrid but, distrusted by Rafa Benítez then Zinedine Zidane, has never been quite the same since.
When he joined Everton in 2020, I confess I thought it a good move: how could you not want to see a player of such obvious quality? If a club are not going to win titles, let it at least be fun, and for four or five games Everton were. He scored in a 5-2 win over West Brom, and got two in a 4-2 win over Brighton. And then the drift began. He became an intermittent presence, a frustration, a costly embellishment they couldn’t really afford. Perhaps in a better-organised club, with a more coherent squad around him … but that’s a conversation that’s been going on for a decade. He needs a team built for him and, while Colombia can do that, club sides can’t.
And so Rodríguez lingers, a beautiful relic of an earlier age, the only hope that he can keep himself going another 18 months so we get to see him once more for Colombia on the stage that suits him best, the World Cup.
