Josef Martinez is back to his game-winning best.
The Venezuelan striker, one of the top all-time goal-scorers in the history of Major League Soccer, led his San Jose Earthquakes to a 6-1 victory over D.C. United on Sunday. Martinez scored three of his team’s six goals and earned himself the match MVP award.
It’s a heartwarming turnaround for a stellar player who has faced more than his share of setbacks.
In 2018, Martinez was the centerpiece of Atlanta United’s fearsome attack. He scored a record-breaking 28 goals and closed out the season as just the fifth player in history to be voted league MVP and cup final MVP in the same year. It’s rarified air: the likes of David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Landon Donovan couldn’t manage the same feat during their MLS careers. Lionel Messi, for all his talent, hasn’t come close yet either.
MLS fans and pundits expected Martinez to continue that league-leading form as he pushed in 2019. A serious of injuries — first a gruesome ACL tear, then a knee problem — derailed those expectations.
Years passed, and Martinez found himself outside of Atlanta’s starting 11 and clashing with the team’s new coach, Gabriel Heinze. He signed with struggling club Inter Miami to reboot his career … but he signed in January 2023, just six months before the club rebranded itself by hiring Messi and Luis Suarez.
Instead of returning to the top, Martinez sank backwards, and Miami declined to renew his contract when it expired at the end of the season.
When Martinez arrived in San Jose this winter, he did so in a precarious position. Yes, he had the shine from his remarkable 2018 season, but that shine was dulled by his injury history and lack of consistent playing time. San Jose’s support of him was considered a gamble, a shot in the dark, the kind of move only a team in deep trouble would ever dare to make.
If signing Martinez was a gamble, though, it proved to be an intelligent one. San Jose coach Bruce Arena took just four months to unlock Martinez’s potential and bring him back to his 2018 best. He scored in San Jose’s second game of the season, netting the winner against Sporting Kansas City, then opened the floodgates with his hat trick against D.C. United on Matchday 7. It was his first hat trick since that charmed Atlanta season in 2018.
What changed? For Arena, a coach who has worked with lots of mercurial strikers like Martinez, it was all about service.
“I think some of our issues in our first six games away … We haven’t found him,” Arena said of Martinez. “We haven’t noticed some of the runs he’s made today. He’s getting some chances. He scored three goals. He could have had a fourth one right at the end. That’s a real positive.”
Indeed it is. Quite simply, finding Martinez means finding goals, and no team in MLS needs to do that more than San Jose. After a rough 2024 that saw the club sink to last place, Martinez’s form — inspired by Arena’s coaching — is changing everything for the team.
It’s changing everything for Martinez, too. He looks lighter, freer; in short, he looks like the man who lifted the MLS Cup in 2018 again. The league is all the better for it.
Martinez and San Jose will return to MLS action on 12 away at LAFC.
