Ricardo Iván Rodríguez Araya

Written by Sebastian Wendel, Lucas Werder, Stefan Kreis, Carlo Frezza, Tim Guillemin and Christian Finkbeiner for Blick:

The son of a Spanish father and a Chilean mother grew up in Zurich, and while his brothers Roberto and Francisco Rodriguez also made it as professional footballers, the most successful is clearly Ricardo, who played his 100th game for Switzerland before the last World Cup. Being part of the Swiss 2009 Under-17 World Cup winning team launched a career that has taken him to Wolfsburg, Milan, Eindhoven and Torino, where he has been a defensive mainstay since 2020. Ricardo Rodriguez is best friends with Swiss captain Granit Xhaka, with whom he always shared a room when with the national team. His career as a footballer is all the more remarkable given he had a difficult start to life: due to a diaphragmatic hernia at birth, doctors only gave him a 50% chance of survival. In 2015, he lost his mother Marcela to cancer and has the year of her birth, 68, tattooed on his back.