Hormiga González: Mexico's 'Goal Drought' Is Really a Minutes Drought

On an evening last February, as Mexico dismantled Iceland 4-0, I was raising the volume on my headphones trying to catch one specific sound — not the roar of the stands, but the sudden hush that falls just before the ball arrives inside the penalty area. Inside that hush was a name: Armando 'Hormiga' González. He touched a low cross from the left and sent the ball into the net — his first goal in a Mexico shirt. Then time moved on. At the 2026 World Cup, when he came on as a substitute for the final minutes against South Africa, what I heard was the opposite — one burst of applause, then a sound that quickly faded.

Now one number circulates everywhere: one goal, one assist. The Mexican media has given it a name — falta de gol, the absence of goals. But every time I have stepped outside the scoresheet and listened to the match, I have felt that this number counts goals, not minutes. A striker's real value tends to hide inside those minutes that never appear on any table.

The year I stopped calling matches and started listening to them, I learned that the real information is not in the press conference — it lives in the sound of a stadium emptying. In September 2026, sitting at Mestalla as Valencia won 5-0, I put down the microphone. In 2026, in an empty stadium for Valencia against Levante, I spent six hours and forty minutes with two recorders. That habit still teaches me: before judging a striker, listen to the silence around him.

González's story is really the story of a young man standing between two pipelines. On one side is Liga MX, where Chivas is a peculiar club — member-owned, with a policy of fielding only Mexican players. That self-imposed rule keeps Chivas both romantic and limited: it builds stars, then survives by selling them. That season, González scored 24 goals in a Chivas shirt — which, in Mexican football's vocabulary, creates a saleable asset.

On the other side is Europe. Olympiacos buys young Latin American forwards and develops them — a staircase from which a leap to a bigger league becomes possible. González arrived and scored four goals and one assist in his first official matches. By club record, the boy knows how to score.

In the national shirt, the arithmetic reverses. In his first appearances: one goal, one assist — both in that single Iceland match. His 2026 World Cup debut against South Africa came in the final minutes, as a substitute. In Javier Aguirre's team, the attack is now built around Raúl Jiménez and Julián Quiñones; González is the waiting piece standing outside that centre. Working with Rafa Márquez, he has shown good things but has not been decisive — in the words of Mexican writers, that is his current identity. Aguirre did not lean on him much, yet kept him in the World Cup squad and called him a piece of future potential.

Here the real question appears: is the goal shortage a striker's problem, or a system's problem? To answer it, you have to look away from the scoresheet and into the box.

González's only international goal came from inside the penalty area, from a low Gallardo cross. The pattern is not random. His 24-goal Chivas season was built on exactly this kind of goal — arriving late in the box, finishing in one touch, striking calmly from inside six yards. In the Mexico shirt that pattern has not disappeared; what has disappeared is the service that feeds it. A box finisher's goals depend on how many balls reach him, and in the national team González receives the fewest.

The comparison is clear. Raúl Jiménez is a hybrid — a target man, sometimes a false nine; he drops into build-up, holds the ball, sits at the centre of the team's play. González is not that type, and cannot be cast in that role. When Jiménez and Quiñones are the axis of the attack in Aguirre's setup, González becomes a weapon kept for the last fifteen minutes — a role that structurally suppresses his goal count. A striker who comes on late receives the ball cold, without rhythm; in fifteen minutes he gets one or two touches in the box, while the expectation remains that of ninety.

That 4-0 Iceland match is now the centre of all discussion — Mexican writers correctly called it his most productive match so far. But an open, fast game and a game against a deep defence are entirely different lives for a box finisher. In an open match there is space in the box, crosses arrive, rhythm forms. Against a side sitting in a low block, that space contracts. Building expectations on that one match means stepping into a small-sample trap. The expectation created by four goals in one game is not the fruit of the player's ability, but of circumstance.

I have seen this mistake many times: a young striker who ignites at club level is written off as a failure when he cannot score for the national team. But the question should be: how many box touches does he get per ninety minutes, how many shots does he take, how much xG does he generate? Those answers never make headlines, because raw goal counts are easy and per-90 arithmetic is hard. National-team goals are a kind of reputational currency in Mexican public life — however good the club form, a player who fails to earn that currency carries a shadow beside his name.

There is a contradiction in Aguirre's usage that nobody states directly. He did not lean on González much, yet took him to the World Cup and called him a piece of future potential. The meaning is clear: the coach likes the profile, not yet the current role. In this kind of management — holding a young striker in reserve to develop him — talent is not wasted; rhythm is. And a box finisher without rhythm becomes his own shadow. With Márquez he has shown good things but has not been decisive — that verdict, too, is really the product of missing rhythm.

I remember an evening last year. Sitting in an empty stadium, I listened to how a substitute shouts while warming up, and how that sound echoed off the empty seats. A player built for ninety minutes, if called for the last ten, does not get his body into those ten. González's national-team story is exactly this kind of ten-minute story — one where the talent is present and the opportunity is not.

There is another layer to this story that the Mexican fan's eye often skips. Chivas is a member-owned club with a Mexican-only policy. The romantic side of that rule sounds beautiful in a story, but its financial side is this: the club must build stars and sell them, and such sales usually retain a sell-on clause so that a share of future value returns. González is now in that value-appreciation phase — young, quickly adapted in Europe, present in the national team. For Olympiacos he is a buy-develop-sell asset; for Chivas he is a future cheque with an indefinite clearance date. Behind the romantic narrative that a small club beats a giant hides precisely this financial inequality.

And one more thing almost nobody adds to this discussion. In modern football, live data flows straight into betting companies, and every shot, every miss of a striker enters that feed. When the number one goal, one assist reaches the media, it stops being innocent statistics; it becomes a bettable narrative. The same data that evaluates a striker turns him into a product in the market — and there, the headline of a goal shortage is information to some and business to others.

Olympiacos is a top contender in the Greek domestic league — a platform where regular goals and European-competition experience both arrive. That platform feeds González's national-team case. But the curious thing is that a goal scored in Greece and a goal scored in an El Tri shirt do not carry equal weight in Mexican public opinion. So his real fight is not with opposing defences, but with his own country's arithmetic of expectation.

The Greek league and Liga MX are both steps on this staircase. Olympiacos are title contenders in Greece; playing regularly there brings goals, and goals open the national-team door. But this staircase carries a risk: if his goals dry up in Europe, the club's asset value falls, and Chivas's sell-on calculation suffers too. In other words, González's feet do not only carry his own career; they carry the financial arithmetic of two clubs on two continents.

Here is my hesitation. Mexican football memory wants to file this event as a striker who cannot score in an El Tri shirt. But the real picture is the reverse. The problem lies less in the player's feet and more in the system's mould. Mexico's attack is built around Jiménez; a team that reduces the number of balls reaching the penalty area effectively leaves a box finisher uncomfortable. And here is the most uncomfortable truth: the goal-shortage headline is written by the very people who first arranged the system that produced the shortage.

There is a counter-voice in Mexican discussion too — some say the praise for the boy is exaggerated, that he has not yet proved himself on the big stage. That voice is uncomfortable to hear, yet it must be heard, because it reminds me that a gap exists between praise and output, and that gap is now González's address. Inside Chivas's romantic narrative and the story of young Mexican talent, one also has to see the arithmetic of financial inequality and impatient expectation.

In Mexican media, once a striker's goal drought settles into a no marca label, it lasts a long time — the data may change, the label does not. This is the most dangerous spot, because a reputation built on a small sample can become permanent for no good reason, and then a player must fight for longer against less evidence than he deserves.

If he scores even one goal in the next window, the whole narrative can flip within a single match — that is how thin this sample is. So my request: before judging a striker by raw goals, look at his per-90 touches, his entries into the box, his xG. The period from 2026 to 2030 is a generational transition in Mexico's attack — Jiménez is ageing, Quiñones and González are rising. The year I stopped calling matches and learned to listen to them, that lesson now says: the ant is still working inside the box; only the camera has not turned toward him.