When Borgetti Says Mexico Must Stop Clinging to Jiménez, I Hear the Fear of an Entire Football Nation

At fifty-four, I sit down after every match not to rewatch the goals, but to listen again to the voices left behind in the tunnel. That night, the news from Mexico arrived late. Jared Borgetti — the man who once scored against Italy at the 2026 World Cup, who was once the sharp point of every cross — went on television and said something that sounded simple: the Mexican national team cannot depend on a single forward.

I thought of Raúl Jiménez. Not the Jiménez of goals, but the Jiménez of the substitutes' bench, of the medical table, of those bowed heads in the tunnel after yet another injury. The ball rolls on the grass, but in truth it rolls across a human fate.

The story begins with an absence. Jiménez — a striker who has carried the Mexican national team through several World Cups, once of Wolves and now of Fulham in the Premier League — is sitting out with an injury. That absence instantly became a large question: who does Mexico play with? Borgetti's answer, from a forward who is a legend of Santos Laguna, does not aim at finding a replacement. He speaks of something else — how a national team defines itself.

Borgetti stresses that the collective must stand above the individual, even without Jiménez. That sounds reasonable. But in football, a reasonable statement is not always an answer. If Mexico could truly play with everyone, no one would need to go on television to repeat it. This is when I remember the line I keep in my notebook: seeking the human voice inside the voice of the ball.

Then he speaks of Santos Laguna — his old club. Four consecutive victories. The club from Torreón is edging closer to a Liguilla place, the playoff phase that decides the Liga MX champion. Borgetti praises the board, the coaching staff and the players for their patience and work. But his final sentence holds one word that stops me: hopefully it will be enough.

Among those stories sits a young name: Armando González. A forward developed at Chivas, now moved to Olympiacos in Greece. Borgetti speaks of him in the language of growth — not money, not contracts, but of growing emotionally, personally, in dreams.

Now to the part where I want to linger longest. What Borgetti says is not a tactic. It is a principle. And a principle differs from a formation. A national team cannot be organised around one focal striker — it sounds right, civilised, modern. But football does not run on beautiful principles. It runs on specific functions.

What is Jiménez within Mexico's system? He is not merely a scorer. He is the anchor. A textbook traditional No. 9 — holding the ball, linking play, pulling centre-backs out of position, opening space for runners behind him. When you say play with everyone, you are answering a question about spirit. You have not answered a question about position. Who will hold the ball up? Who will drag the defenders? Who will be the one to receive the long balls in the second half?

This is the blind spot I found after years in the stands. When a national team says we depend on everyone, it is usually voicing a different, quieter truth: they have no one good enough to carry the load, so they spread responsibility into collective belief. Not a tactical choice. A way of enduring.

Borgetti understands this better than anyone. He was once the one who carried. At the 2026 World Cup he was Mexico's spearhead, and when the team went out, people remembered him not for what the side did, but for what he alone could not do. The one who carries is always the one remembered in defeat. Perhaps that is why, at this age, he wants the national team to learn how to stop placing everything on one person.

On Armando González, there is one thing I want to say plainly. A young player leaving Chivas for Olympiacos — that is the familiar Latin American path: grow at home, sell yourself to Europe, and hope not to be swallowed whole. But today's transfer market is no longer a place of pure dreams. The price of a young player who has not yet played fifty top-flight matches has been pushed to absurd numbers. It is a naked gamble, and the one who pays last is often not the club but the player — when the pressure to be worth that price presses on twenty-year-old legs.

Borgetti speaks of González in the language of emotion, not of contracts. I understand why. When you talk about money, you must talk about risk. And the risk of a young player going to Europe is a subject no one wants to hear on television at eleven at night.

Now to what I want to say in reverse. All of us — Borgetti, me, the fans — are looking at Mexico through the lens of Jiménez. We ask: what will this team be without him? But that may be the wrong question.

The worry is not that Mexico lacks Jiménez. The worry is that Mexico has grown used to having a Jiménez to lack. For more than a decade, Mexican football lived in a false comfort: there was always a striker good enough to carry, to hide larger holes in midfield, in controlling tempo, in tactical identity. When the carrier is absent, people read it as a temporary crisis. It may only be the moment the curtain is lifted.

And here is where I find Borgetti right in a way he himself may not realise. When he says the team depends on everyone, he is unknowingly admitting something: Mexico has no successor generation of forwards of sufficient stature. Armando González is a signal — but the signal of a broken current, where young players must go to Europe to mature, instead of maturing at home before leaving.

I witnessed this once, in a very different place. On 27 June 2026, in Kazan, I sat in the stands and watched Germany — the reigning champions — fall to South Korea. No one played badly. An entire system suffered a crisis of belief. Possession numbers became meaningless against devotion. The German machine broke down, and I saw a generation weep without sound. The lesson of that year still stands: a national team does not collapse because it lacks a star. It collapses because it believes it cannot collapse.

Borgetti is not speaking to us about a match. He is speaking about a fear. The fear of a football culture so used to having someone carry it that it does not know what to do when that someone is gone.

People score with their feet, but I write with my scars. And the deepest scar in Mexican football right now is not in Jiménez's knee. It lies in the empty space behind him — where a generation should be, but only a hope remains.