Guillermo Martínez

Biography

“Memote” Martínez is a burly, strong-backed, sharp-finishing centre-forward who reached the national team the long way round. He offers a different profile in Mexico’s attack: a target man with aerial presence and pure penalty-box craft, the kind of nine who holds up play and buys time for his teammates to arrive.

His game is built on contact: he shields the ball with his back to goal, wins aerial duels through positioning rather than pure spring, and finishes just as well with his head as with his foot inside the six-yard box. He isn’t a player of long runs but of showing up at exactly the right moment.

Before any fame, he spent years bouncing through the second tier and smaller clubs, racking up goals away from the spotlight with no guarantees of anything. He changed clubs several times chasing minutes, always carrying the same question of whether his chance in the top flight would ever come.

His perseverance paid off in his late twenties, when he finally found his place in the top flight and began making himself known with his scoring instinct. It was a late, almost quiet rise, built goal by goal without shortcuts.

The decisive breakout came at Pumas, where he was a Liga MX top scorer and won over the fans on the strength of his goals and a commitment visible in every duel. His is the story of a player who never stopped believing, even when recognition took almost an entire career to arrive.

At the World Cup Mexico is playing at home, with Aguirre in charge and Álvarez as captain, Martínez adds an option different from Jiménez and Giménez: a traditional box striker for matches decided in the air or from set pieces. After a perfect run through the group stage and the win over Ecuador that returned Mexico to a knockout round it hadn’t reached since 1986, his place on the roster is, in itself, a story of never giving up.