He’s not going to be here in 2 years. He’s neither this nor that, and while he is a useful utility man, he does nothing exceptionally, while being small, not fast and not the strongest.
Lovely kid, love his energy, but I’m just not convinced he has enough of a complete package to make it at City. Sorry.
(
@HypnoticBlue looks like you beat me to it.)
The way I see Rico is that currently he’s a great utility squad player who’s been forced into starting every week because of the injury crisis. He’s a great link player, one of very few players who runs with the ball, when the team is playing well, he speeds up our movement of the ball and that creates tons of space further up the pitch to get Haaland, the wingers the ball in situations they can be dangerous.
It would be really short sighted imo to decide a (just turned) 20 year old is never going to be good enough to start just because he isn’t right now, and even if he never gets there, every squad needs these kind of players who can play any position the team needs them to at an OK level when the rest of the team is firing.
Remember midfield is sacred to Pep, Foden barely gets trusted with a game there at 24, loads of good players have not been trusted there by Pep so he must see something special at Rico to be putting him in there as a teenager and I’m more than happy to trust his judgment.
IMO it’s more likely that Rico learns rapidly from this experience (much more than he did from being a small cog in an all-conquering city side) and it might take him coming out of the team for a bit to make the improvements and grow from these lessons, but next time he’s called upon to be a starter for an extended time he’ll be much better and shows he belongs.
Remember this kid is younger than Savio, Bobb, McAtee, Doku and basically everyone else in the squad. He should be expected to be inconsistent and make mistakes, he’s barely started his career in football and he’s being asked to play a new position, the most difficult position in a Pep system, in a broken team with zero confidence.
Look at how good Curtis Jones is now, when he was being relied on by Klopp 18 months ago he was a glaring weakness in the Liverpool side who got a lot of the same criticisms (what does he do exactly??). Also worth mentioning Jones had his breakout after a change in manager, and we have one of those coming up in 12/24 months. So the least I expect is for him to still be here for 1 season post-Pep.
