The Ant Without a Trail: Armando 'Hormiga' González and the Real Address of Mexico's Goal Drought

Late last February I sat in a tea stall in Mirpur at two in the morning, watching Mexico play Iceland. The scoreline read 4-0. The scoreline was never my subject. The subject was a low cross from the left by Jesús Gallardo — grass-skimming, threading between a defender's legs — and a small body arriving inside the box, six yards out, at exactly the right instant. The scorer was Armando 'Hormiga' González. The nickname means 'ant'.

An ant carries many times its own weight, but only along a trail other ants have already walked. When the trail closes, it does not perform heroics — it stops, and waits. That night, Gallardo's cross was an open trail. Since then, in Mexico's green shirt, González has one goal and one assist. This is not a story about a lost gift. This is a story about a lost trail.

I have been calling matches on Bangladesh Betar since 2026, and later writing documentaries from behind the camera. Across those three and a half decades I have learned one thing repeatedly: a forward's goal count is sometimes a measure of his ability, and sometimes a measure of his service. Who passes, how often, at what height, at what speed — without those questions, the number becomes nothing but an accusation. And the accusation lands most easily on the young man who came from a foreign league and gets the fewest minutes for his country.

González entered Mexico's football imagination through a familiar, almost mechanical route. Twenty-four goals in a single season for Chivas in Guadalajara. Then Greece: four goals and one assist in his first official matches for Olympiacos. The MEXSPORT analysis treats this transition as its central thread — exporting young forwards from Liga MX to Europe is an old current in Mexico's football economy, and Chivas is that current's cleanest exporter: a member-owned club where only Mexican players may play. At club level his profile is clear. He is not a link player, not a false nine, not a build-up hub. He is a box-arrival finisher, a penalty-box predator.

For the national team, the story sits somewhere else entirely. Javier Aguirre's Mexico is built around Raúl Jiménez and Julián Quiñones — one an experienced target forward, the other a rising co-protagonist. González arrives as a rotation piece, an impact substitute. He made the 2026 World Cup squad and debuted against South Africa, but in the closing minutes. In Rafa Márquez's eyes there is 'something good' in him, but nothing 'decisive' yet. Aguirre has not counted on him heavily — yet kept him in the squad and marked him as a future asset.

Between those two sentences lies a small crack. That crack is my real subject.

My years of watching tell me González's 'goal drought' is not a finishing failure but a question of role and minutes. His only international goal came from a low cross into the box — precisely the pattern that produced 24 goals at Chivas. A pattern that has worked once does not evaporate. What evaporates is the service, and the trail.

The substitute-striker problem is arithmetic, not moral. A box finisher lives on touch volume — how often he receives inside the area, in what position, from whom. A forward sent on for the final minutes receives the ball in a cold body, without the rhythm of the game; by then defenders have re-set their line and the tempo has dropped. Goals are possible here, but not repeatable. A player denied a run of seven or eight starts cannot have his quality measured by his goal count.

Here I owe a confession. I do not have González's per-90 touch map, nor granular xG, nor any reliable pressing-intensity figure. What I do not have, I will not invent — that has long been my habit. What is clear is the structure: Mexico's attack is Jiménez-centric, and in Aguirre's system the second striker's slot is confined to rotation.

Then there is the thing almost nobody discusses. The service that made González — low crosses from a winger hugging the touchline — is being quietly erased by modern football. Today's winger drifts inside to shoot, the full-back overlaps, and the box finisher is left outside the frame. The more homogeneous the game becomes, the narrower the trail of the small predator in the box. Gallardo's cross was therefore not merely an assist — it was a portrait of an endangered species.

I hear the crowd as a chorus, the scoreboard as only its first line.

The comparison with Jiménez matters here. Jiménez is a hybrid of target forward and false nine — he holds the ball, links play, drags defenders out, and in doing so lets the rest of the attack breathe. González is the final step, not the beginning or the middle. In a system where ball-retention is someone else's burden, a box finisher's success depends on another man's mood. That is not a player's deficiency; it is a player's position.

Add the two voices on the bench. Aguirre is head coach and decides; Márquez works on integrating the young, and his eye is softer. The same player's minutes therefore swing between two evaluations — one keeps him because he is needed, the other believes he is needed now. For a forward whose minutes are coach-dependent and unstable, rhythm is hard to build, and without rhythm a finisher's goals fall like rain without a slope.

The Olympiacos stage paints the reverse picture. Greece's top club, a domestic title contender, a regular in European competition — that means regular service, regular opportunity, regular goals. He gets the trust there that he has not been given in the national shirt. And this is where the familiar European chain hides: buy young from Latin America, develop in Greece, sell upward to a bigger league at a profit. Chivas, too, is an exporter, so it may hold a share of his next sale — his goals are Mexico's pride and, in part, a club's balance sheet.

Now to the place where the most comfortable explanation hides. Mexico's football public has an old habit — it counts national-team goals as daily currency. A man with 24 club goals who fails to score in the national shirt is branded 'no marca' — he doesn't score — and that label outlives the data. A single 4-0 match becomes an anchor of expectation; when it goes unmet, the story slides from 'talented, but...' to 'perhaps not that good after all.'

I think the real trap is here. A self-reinforcing loop forms: fewer minutes, fewer goals, the label, more pressure, less freedom. Inside this loop the finisher's quality is never once tested; only the opportunity keeps shrinking. That is why judging him off the Iceland 4-0 is dangerous — that was an open, high-tempo match in which a box finisher breathes easily. Against a low block and a crowded defence, his involvement should be expected to fall.

There is another layer almost untouched in this debate. Chivas to Olympiacos is not only a playing journey but an asset-value curve. Every transfer window is really a documentary in which people learn to perform themselves as assets. González stands in the middle of that chain — where a goal is not only a goal, but a price.

Sitting in Dhaka, I have watched grief refuse the stands and learn to travel — calls come from Toronto, from Kuwait, from Sylhet, and someone tells me he has named his son Messi. Mexico's 'no goals' debate is that same travelling grief. The way a scouting net finds genius is also the way it turns a family into a lottery ticket — winning or losing is a matter of luck.

In the next international window I will watch two things: how many minutes González gets, and how often per 90 he touches the ball in the box. The goal count will then answer itself. From 2026 to 2030 lies the succession window for Mexico's attack; Jiménez is ageing, and Quiñones and González are the two claimants to that vacancy. If someone gives this boy six straight starts and he still fails, then the label is fair. Not before.

A missed penalty can redraw a city; but an undelivered cross draws no one and is remembered by no one. The ant is waiting for the trail to open. The question is not his patience — the question is our watching.