Zague Is Half Right: Mexico Doesn't Lack Forwards Going to Europe, It Lacks Forwards Who Stay

Zague Is Half Right: Mexico Doesn't Lack Forwards Going to Europe, It Lacks Forwards Who Stay

"The difficult thing is not to arrive, but to stay."

Luis Roberto Alves — the man an entire generation of Mexican fans calls Zague — said this in a TV studio, with the voice of someone who has stood exactly where he is now advising others not to get comfortable. He is one of the highest scorers in the history of the Mexican national team. He did not say this as an outside pundit. He said it as a man who has walked the very path that 'La Hormiga' González is now walking.

And I, a man in Saigon sitting fourteen flight-hours from Mexico City, read that line three times.

The first time, I nodded. The second time, I sensed something was missing. The third time, I opened my notebook and started counting from scratch.

When the numbers speak, I listen; when the crowd shouts, I count from scratch.

And here, the crowd is shouting in a very familiar direction: Mexico has a new generation of forwards landing in Europe, and all they need to do is "stay". Zague said it. Mexican media repeated it. Then half a continent on the other side of the world nodded along.

But the question nobody asks is: stay to do what, stay at what cost, and stay for how long before we call it success?

That is where Zague's beautiful quote begins to crack.

---

Context: One piece of advice, and the ecosystem behind it

To understand why Zague's line deserves this much scrutiny, we need to place it in the exact frame it appeared in.

'La Hormiga' González — 'Hormiga' meaning ant, the nickname Mexican media gave to a small but tenacious forward — has just joined Olympiacos, one of the biggest clubs in Greece. This is the kind of destination that analysts politely call a "stepping stone". A stepping stone for what? To jump to a bigger league. To be seen on the European stage. To add another good line to a dossier that an agent can hand to clubs in the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga.

Olympiacos is not the destination. Olympiacos is the shop window.

And in that same picture, Zague mentions three other names: Raúl Jiménez, Santiago Giménez, and Pato Salas. Four Mexican forwards, across four different European leagues. It sounds good. It sounds as if Mexico is producing an attacking generation thick enough to face anyone.

But that "sounds good" is exactly what I want to put on the scale.

Because this is not a story about four individuals. This is a story about a model — the Mexican forward-export model. And this model, like every model, has a blind spot. That blind spot is not in production. It is in retention.

Before going deeper, I need to make my position clear, because I do not want to be filed among those who criticise for sport. I am not saying Mexico has no good forwards. I am saying that the way people are telling the story about them — with optimism, with names, with nicknames — is hiding a much more uncomfortable statistical reality.

And that reality can be summed up in a line I have used throughout my career: the crowd has the right to be deluded, but I have the right to wake up.

---

Core: Why "staying" is always harder than "arriving" — and harder than Zague describes

Let's start with a player-development principle that anyone who has done this job knows, but few are willing to say plainly: the hardest phase of a player's career is not the moment he moves abroad. It is the second season.

The first season, the player has the advantage of surprise. Opponents don't yet know how he moves, which foot he shoots with, where he likes to receive the ball. Defenders aren't yet used to his rhythm. Opposition coaches have no footage to dissect. That is the period I call the "window of innocence" — and it is always finite.

The second season, the window closes. Defenders now know he likes to cut inside onto his left. Coaches now know he is weak in duels. The whole league now has a page on him, and that page thickens with every matchday. At this point, what decides a career is no longer raw talent. It is adaptability — what the industry calls the consolidation phase.

Zague, though he doesn't use the term, is talking about exactly this phase. "Hard to arrive, harder to stay" — translated into the language of data, means: signing a contract is an event, holding a starting role across multiple seasons is a process. And those two things are, in probabilistic terms, unrelated.

Now look at the model he is praising.

Four names, four leagues, one unanswered question

Zague lists Raúl Jiménez, Santiago Giménez, and Pato Salas as evidence of Mexican football's flourishing. I don't dispute that they exist. I dispute that their existence is used as a quality indicator without anyone checking that indicator.

Let's separate these four names by tier.

The first tier is top-tier European clubs — where Jiménez and Giménez play. This is the highest tier a Mexican forward can reach under normal conditions. But even here, we must distinguish sharply between "playing in a top league" and "being a pillar of a club in a top league". Those are two entirely different levels, and Mexican media constantly merges them.

The second tier is "stepping-stone" clubs — Olympiacos is the textbook case. This is the tier where a player gets European cup football, gets seen, but does not face the best defences in world football week in, week out. In other words: a tier with light but little heat.

And the gap between these two tiers is exactly where most Mexican forwards' careers get stuck.

I don't have the chance-conversion dataset for each man at hand as I write this — and I will not invent one. But the principle is clear: a forward who shines at stepping-stone level is not guaranteed to hold up at top-tier level, whereas a forward who holds up at top-tier level will almost certainly shine at stepping-stone level. This is an asymmetric relationship, and anyone treating Olympiacos and the Premier League as two equivalent degrees of "European success" is misreading the nature of this market.

The Paulinho lesson: don't trust the number, trust its distribution

Here I must tell an old story, because it is the root of how I have viewed football ever since.

In 2026, when an entire football culture was praising Paulinho for scoring 19 goals in the Chinese Super League, I did something many considered trolling: I sat down and counted which teams those 19 goals came against. The result: most of them came against bottom-table sides. I built a comparison table against chance-conversion baselines in the V.League and J.League, and concluded that the "19 goals", under more objective conditions, reflected only an average midfielder.

The internet mob came for me. Then later, when Paulinho moved to La Liga and scored a mere 3 goals, the story closed itself.

Paulinho's 19 goals were not a dishonest number. It was a correct number placed in a wrong context. And that is exactly what is happening with the "four Mexican forwards in Europe" story.

Four names is a correct number. But it says nothing about the tier distribution of those four names. One plays in a top league, one at a stepping stone, one fighting for his place, one unclear — merging all four into "a generation" is a convenient addition. And in football, convenient addition is always the sign of a hidden truth.

The hidden truth here is: Mexico produces forwards good enough to be bought, but has not yet proven it produces forwards good enough to be kept. And those two things, again, are different things.

Olympiacos is a sweet trap, not a cradle

Now let's talk specifically about 'La Hormiga' González, because he is the central figure of this story.

A Mexican forward moves to Olympiacos. It sounds like a step up. But if you look through the eyes of someone who counts, this is a lateral move presented as an upward one.

Why? Because Olympiacos has three features any forward must understand before signing.

First, Olympiacos is a top-table side in a league where defensive quality is uneven. This means the forward will score — but those goals are not benchmarked against Europe's best defences. This is an ideal environment to inflate a metric, not to test it. And an inflated metric always has a day it must deflate.

A sports bubble doesn't burst with a bang, it deflates with a sigh.

Second, Olympiacos plays in European competition. This is a double-edged sword. If González shines there, he gets sold to a bigger league — the beautiful scenario. But if he does not shine there, his "European player" label is stripped off immediately, and he returns to his true starting position: a good forward in a small league.

Third — and this is the most important to me — Olympiacos is an environment where a coach's patience with a foreign forward is typically very short. Stepping-stone clubs always face immediate-result pressure, and that pressure is always dumped on imported attackers first. A five-game scoring drought, and the bench is waiting. There, there is no such thing as "time to adapt".

So Zague's "harder to stay" is right. But the "staying" he means is not staying at Olympiacos. It is staying on the path — meaning not being pushed back to Mexico after eighteen months, not disappearing from the radar of big clubs, not becoming a footnote in an article about "the failed transfers of Mexican football".

And to stay on that path, González needs something Zague never mentions: backstage support structure.

Here I must speak about something Vietnamese media routinely ignores when covering European-based players, and it is a regrettable blind spot.

What nobody counts: the dressing room, language, and the agent

When a Mexican forward goes to Greece, what he faces daily is not the defence of Italian or English sides. What he faces is a dressing room where his mother tongue may be a minority. A coach who may give instructions in two foreign languages. A culture of eating, living, training completely different from the one he was raised in. The loneliness after every training session when the team goes out to eat together and he goes back to the hotel.

Those things have no xG. But they decide xG.

I have watched football since the days the pitch still smelled of earth, not of money. And that smell of earth taught me something no stat sheet could: a player doesn't play only with his feet. He plays with mental stability, with a sense of belonging, with having a roommate who speaks Spanish.

That is why I always rate highly those clubs that actively build logistics for imported players — interpreters, sports psychologists, integration plans for the player's family. These are investments mid-tier clubs usually skip, and precisely because they skip them, they routinely lose money on deals that should have succeeded.

Our own V.League has learned this lesson too — foreign players arriving and leaving after one season, not because they lacked talent, but because they lacked people. An agent handles the contract. But nobody handles whether that player can still smile after the thirtieth training session.

Zague, in advising "stay", assumed willpower is decisive. I believe structure is decisive. And structure doesn't depend on a player's "determination". It depends on whether the club prepared.

The denominator trap

There is a methodological error that both Mexican and Vietnamese media commit, and I want to name it directly: using the numerator to represent the whole fraction, while forgetting the denominator.

When people say "there are four Mexican forwards in Europe", the number "four" is the numerator. But to understand it, you need the denominator: over the past decade, how many Mexican forwards tried to go to Europe and failed? If the answer is forty, then that "four" is not an achievement — it is a ten percent survival rate. And a ten percent survival rate is not something anyone calls success.

This is what I call the hidden denominator trap. It is the favourite weapon of every media department in football, not just Mexico's. Clubs use it to sell tickets. Federations use it to raise budgets. Agents use it to negotiate the next deal for their next client.

And fans, poor souls, are always the last to be told about the denominator.

I say this not to discourage anyone. I say it to set a standard. If you want to know whether Mexican football is truly producing a generation of European-class forwards, don't count how many are playing there. Count how many have stayed after four seasons, in a starting role, at the highest league level they can reach.

That number will be far lower than the tributes want you to believe. And that number is the real answer to Zague's question.

---

An outside view: comparing with how Vietnamese football produces and exports players

I write from Saigon, so I must speak about this from my own experience.

Vietnam has a similar story — just at a smaller scale. When a Vietnamese player moves to Japan, Korea, or further to Europe, domestic media immediately turns the event into a historic milestone. And I don't deny it is a milestone. But I am also one of the very few who opposes celebrating in the "arrive" mode while ignoring the "stay" mode.

In Vietnam, in Mexico, and everywhere, the same model repeats: a young player has one good domestic season, moves abroad, is introduced as a turning point, then gradually disappears from the radar, until one day there is news he returns to his old club on loan. And then both media and fans forget that they themselves declared it a turning point.

I call this the endless export-recycling loop. Import hope, export disappointment, then import hope again. And it only stops when some club invests in the integration stage — the stage nobody boasts about on the scoreboard.

Take Olympiacos again, as a textbook case. A mid-tier European club, with a modest budget, always faces two choices when signing a foreign player: (1) sign him, put him on the pitch, hope he shines immediately; or (2) sign him, then invest an extra 15-20% of the deal budget into ensuring he integrates. Most clubs choose option (1), because it is cheaper now and faster on the books. And most clubs lose money, because they saved exactly where they should have spent.

This is a principle I have verified across many leagues, from V.League to J.League, from the Greek Super League to Middle Eastern competitions. And it holds. What is saved on recruitment is always more expensive than what is invested in retention.

---

The contrarian view: If I am wrong, where am I wrong?

At this point I must cross-examine myself, because that is rule number one in this job.

First, I may be inflating the power of data in a game where data cannot tell the whole story. Football is a human game, and some things are not measurable. A forward may fail statistically yet succeed professionally — because he stays fit, keeps his place, keeps his coach's respect. Those things aren't on the xG sheet. And if I dismiss everything unmeasurable just because it is unmeasurable, I have made myself a dogmatist.

Second, Zague's comparison benchmark — "England" — may be a false standard. When he says Mexico "still isn't enough" against football's great powers, he is comparing to a national team with deep history, an old development system, a powerful domestic league. That is an asymmetric comparison — like comparing a provincial top student to an Ivy League undergraduate. The gap he measures is not a talent gap. It is a gap of accumulated time. And accumulated time cannot be shortened by signing a few more contracts.

Third, and this I must seriously concede: this model may be working better than I describe. If within three to five years three or four of the current names — Jiménez, Giménez, Salas, González — truly hold starting roles at top European leagues for at least three consecutive seasons, then my thesis that "Mexico produces forwards but cannot keep them" collapses. And I will be the first to applaud. Football has no room for an analyst's ego.

Fourth, I may be imposing a Vietnamese football logic on Mexican football. In Vietnam, we tend to praise patience and dislike constant change — that tendency comes from V.League being a league with high squad stability, unlike European football where managers change like shirts. Applying one league's standard to another is a classic methodological error, and I am not immune to it.

---

On the "honorary trophy" and how people console one another

There is an aspect of this story I want to state clearly, because it has haunted me for years.

Zague refers to Mexico's "great World Cup" as a foundation for optimism. And I understand why. A great World Cup is a very easy thing to celebrate. It gives a whole nation the feeling of progress. It gives sponsors a story to sell. It gives coaches a line on a CV.

But I have seen this story too many times, in too many countries, to still naively believe that "a great World Cup" is evidence of a football culture on the rise.

The honorary trophy is a tissue to wipe the tears of the reigning champion.

When a national team reaches a quarter-final or semi-final and loses, that is not progress — it is an emotional milestone. And emotional milestones, in the end, are what football everywhere produces most easily, because emotions have no denominator.

What Mexico needs is not a great World Cup. What Mexico needs is a run of matches against the world's top teams in which they win — not "play well", not "fight to the end", but win. And to do that, they need forwards who don't just arrive in Europe, but stay in Europe until Europe becomes home.

This is why Zague's advice to 'La Hormiga' is not personal advice. It is a strategic command packaged as a pretty line.

---

The prediction: A falsifiable test

I did not write this piece to mock Mexico. Mexico is a football culture I have followed for years, and I respect the way it always produces attacking players with personality. What I do not respect is the way people treat the story about those players.

So I want to close with a falsifiable test, rather than a happy conclusion.

My prediction: within the next three seasons, the proportion of Mexican forwards in Europe who hold a starting role at the highest league level they can reach will be significantly lower than the expectation media is creating. In other words: most of the four names Zague cites will not stay at the peak of their careers. They will return, or drift to lower leagues, or accept bench roles.

The condition for me to be wrong: if three of the four hold starting roles at a top league for at least three consecutive seasons, plus a win against a top-10 national team in an official competition, then my thesis is fully refuted. And I will write another piece to admit it.

The condition for me to be strengthened: if within eighteen months, at least two of the four return to the Americas, or are sold to lower leagues, then what I write today is no longer an opinion — it becomes a description.

And for 'La Hormiga' González specifically, I have a more precise measure: track him not by goals, but by consecutive starts at Olympiacos in the window from his sixth to his eighteenth month. That is the window in which the window of innocence closes. If he is still standing there after that period, Zague was right, and I will note it.

If he is not, then we know that the advice "stay" — however beautiful — will always remain advice for something no coach can teach: maturity.

---

A final thought

I sit in Saigon, reading a line from a Mexican former striker about another Mexican forward playing in Greece, and I ask myself what makes this story matter to a Vietnamese.

The answer is: it matters because it is not only about Mexico.

It is about every football culture that once believed simply sending its players out into the world was the job done. It is about the gap between appearing and becoming. It is about the uncomfortable truth that a player's career is not decided by the moment he signs a contract, but by the anonymous months afterward, when nobody is reporting on him anymore.

A sports bubble doesn't burst with a bang, it deflates with a sigh.

And if there is one thing I want readers to carry from this piece, it is a question: every time someone boasts to you about a player who has just "gone to Europe", ask them back with a single line — did he go to arrive, or to stay?

The answer to that question will tell you more than all the contracts, all the club press releases, and all the praise from former stars combined.

The crowd has the right to be deluded, but I have the right to wake up.

And I, a forty-nine-year-old man who has watched football across countless seasons, from the days the pitch still smelled of earth rather than money, am still counting from scratch. Not to look cleverer than anyone. But to avoid — at least once — being deceived by my own collective emotion.