Rodrygo reflects on his crisis with Real Madrid last year: "I wasn't well physically or mentally"
"As long as Real Madrid wants me, I'll be here".
Rodrygo has been called for Brazil for a couple of friendly matches in South Korea and Japan, reuniting with the former Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti. The 24-year-old winger had had some strange months, going from one of the key goal scorers of the team to becoming almost insignificant for the team, to the point many assumed he was going to be sold in the summer.
In a lengthy interview with As, Rodrygo said that he is used to it: "Every summer, the same thing happens to me. Whether I'm going to leave or whether I have offers from this club or that. If I listened to the press, every team I was in a different team".
The Brazilian said that "as long as Real Madrid wants me, I'll be here" and so far the team has always told him they want him there. "If one day Real Madrid says to me: "Rodry, find a team," I'll say "OK." But that hasn't happened. And when I had a problem, they were there for me. People speculated because I kept quiet.", he says.
Rodrygo also spoke about the latter months of the 2024/25 season, where the club as a whole went through a rough patch, but particularly Rodrygo. He thanked Ancelotti, his son Davide and the technical staff for their help. "I wasn't well, either physically or mentally. (...) Carlo saw every day that I wasn't well, that I wasn't fit to play, that I couldn't help the team. But there was no time to recover because we played every three days, and then you can't stop to solve the problem. He told me: "Just stay here calmly, you're not fit to play now." I thanked him and asked to play. But he knew he had to recover the person before the player."
In the end, Rodrygo didn't leave, but the player still doesn't usually count for Xabi Alonso (in the first eight Liga matches, he is the 16th player in minutes of playtime, 129, compared to Mbappé's 701 minutes and Vinícius' 592 minutes..
