Zague to 'La Hormiga' González: Arriving in Europe Is Hard — Staying Is Harder

On Wednesday night I sat in front of a screen in Shenzhen, rewinding footage of Olympiacos at the Karaiskakis Stadium. Not to look for goals. I was looking for a name: "La Hormiga" González, the Mexican forward who has just set foot in Greece. And right at that moment, on the other side of the ocean, a man who once scored more than a hundred goals for Mexico said something that made me pause the video and write it in my notebook: "The difficult thing is not to arrive, but to stay."

The man speaking was Luis Roberto Alves — all of Mexico calls him Zague. He was not talking as a pundit dissecting tape. He was talking as someone who once stood in exactly that spot, who knew what it feels like to wake up in a foreign country and realise nobody guarantees you a starting shirt.

Zague's message to González is only one knot in a much larger net. Mexican football sits in the middle of a cycle its media likes to call "new hope". After a World Cup widely judged a success, the national team — El Tricolor — has entered a rebuilding phase with Rafa Márquez as the face of the project. At the same time, a generation of Mexican forwards is scattered across Europe: Raúl Jiménez in the Premier League, Santiago Giménez in Serie A, Pato Salas in another league, and now González at Olympiacos.

I have watched a fair number of matches involving Mexican players in Europe over the past few seasons, and what caught my eye about González was not the name. It was the destination. Olympiacos are a Greek club with a regular European slot, but they are not part of the top five leagues. In other words, this is a stepping stone, not the final stage. For a young forward, a stepping stone has its own value: enough pressure to grow, enough light to be seen, but not yet enough brutality to crush a fragile ego.

Notably, Zague did not aim that advice at González alone. It sits inside a wider frame in which Mexico takes pride in its ability to produce forwards and wonders why those forwards so often fade after their first season abroad.

We need to look straight at Zague's implicit argument. When he talks about Mexico, he does not talk about systems, about a playing philosophy, or about a style carried from youth teams to the senior side. He talks about a forward production line. It is a peculiar way of locating strength: a football nation measuring itself by how many centre-forwards it can export, rather than by how it organises a match.

That framing is real and it has logic. Look at the list of Mexican forwards playing in Europe and you see considerable spread: one in England, one in Italy, one in Greece, one in another league. That spread is a strength — it shows market reach and a scouting network. But it also exposes a gap: none of them is a regular presence in Champions League knockout rounds, the tier people still call the real elite.

A pool of forwards spread across European leagues does not equal a pool of forwards deep enough to stand at the very top tier.

And this is where Zague's line becomes a player-development argument rather than a polite piece of advice. In the career cycle of a player who moves abroad, two milestones get confused. The first is "arriving" — signing the contract, wearing the new shirt, posing with club officials, appearing on the front page. The second is "staying" — keeping a starting place through winter, through a losing run, through a change of head coach, through a hamstring injury in November.

"Arriving" is an event. "Staying" is a process. Media report events; careers are decided by processes.

I once watched a young forward presented with great fanfare at an Eastern European club, score twice in his first three games, then vanish from the starting eleven after the coach was sacked. He was still there, still training, still being paid. But his career had stopped at the first milestone. In Europe there are many ways for a player to "stay" without progressing at all: sitting on the bench, playing for the reserves, waiting for the winter window to be loaned out to the second division.

For González the specific situation is a little more complicated because Olympiacos have a European calendar. That is both an opportunity and a trap. An opportunity, because a forward who scores in European competition is seen by people sitting in the big leagues. A trap, because a congested schedule forces the coach to rotate, and a new arrival is usually the first to be rotated. For González, Olympiacos is a shop window, not a final destination — and a window is only worth something if people can see something inside it.

So where is the real measure? It is not in the transfer fee, and not in the headlines on presentation day. The real measure of a signing lies in the minutes played after eighteen months, not in the photograph after eighteen hours.

But there is a blind spot in this way of telling the story, and it belongs to collective memory rather than to Zague.

For years, Mexican football has celebrated every time one of its forwards sets foot in Europe as though it were a goal. Every contract is proof of national progress. But if "arriving" is the measure of success, then "staying" will always appear as a surprise tragedy — when in reality it is the rule, not the surprise. A football nation that measures itself by the number of exports will always find itself short when it looks at actual minutes played.

The second point is harder to say. When he talks about the national team, Zague places two nearly contradictory sentences side by side: why not dream big, and the fact that the team is still not enough against powers like England. Both are true, but they speak about different things. "Dream big" speaks of ambition. "Not enough" speaks of distance. The trouble is that ambition is usually spoken aloud, while distance is rarely measured. Nobody in this conversation offered a figure, a specific match or a tactical slice to show exactly what Mexico lacks against England: high pressing, pace at the back, or a midfielder good enough to set the tempo. The lack is felt, not diagnosed. And what is only felt is easily forgotten.

Zague's advice is at its best where it makes no promises. He does not tell González he will succeed. He tells him the road ahead is the hard part. A former striker telling a younger striker to prepare for the hardest stretch — that is a rare kindness in an industry used to selling young players short-term dreams.

One day people will forget González ever wore an Olympiacos shirt. Or perhaps a night in Piraeus will turn out to be the first stanza of a long career. Nobody knows. The ball is round, but fate never is — it rolls through the cracks of history. I write about football, but really I write about people. And about a question every smaller football nation must answer for itself: after sending its own out into the world, do we have enough patience to keep them there?