The rise of Julian Quinones: Mexico's World Cup hero who beat Cristiano Ronaldo to the Saudi Golden Boot

Before that first World Cup goal, before the Azteca roar, before the green shirt, there was a boy playing barefoot in Magui Payan.

Quinones would sneak out to play without his parents’ permission, stay on the field so long that he sometimes did not even return home to eat, and keep playing even when his shorts ripped and his mother had to stitch them back together.

Magui Payan was not a polished academy environment. It was football as instinct, as escape, as survival. The ball was not just recreation; it was one of the first signs that Quinones had something that could move him beyond the limits around him.

Cesar Valencia, one of his mentors at Futbol Paz, told ESPN MX that those barefoot games helped shape more than just Quinones’ love for the sport, as they built his body differently. The strength in the ankle, the way he struck the ball, the balance and power in his movements - all of it, in Valencia’s view, was tied to those early conditions.

At Futbol Paz, Quinones was not remembered as just another talented kid. He was remembered as relentless, nicknamed 'Pantera (Panther)' by his team-mates. Valencia though, believed that even that nickname fell short. To him, Quinones was more like a lion, because of the way he attacked the goal.

The move to Mexico changed everything for Quinones. He joined Tigres in 2016, but his path was never linear. He did enjoy an instant coronation in Mexico, but the country gave him what Colombia never did: Time, visibility and belief.

His uncle, Jefferson Quinones, put it clearly in an interview with LA FM the day after Mexico’s 2-0 win over South Africa: "Julian has always shown himself to be someone capable of achieving the impossible. I think today he is living his great dream, which is playing in his first World Cup."

Quinones is not the first naturalized forward to carry Mexican expectations. In this century, names like Guillermo Franco and Rogelio Funes Mori also wore the green, white and red - but neither scored for Mexico at a World Cup. Quinones, by contrast, needed nine minutes.

As luck would have it, Colombia’s World Cup base is in Guadalajara, at Academia Atlas FC. For Quinones, that place is sacred territory.

Guadalajara is where he became a king for Atlas after he left Tigres in 2021. It is where a club that had lived with a 70-year league title drought finally broke the curse in the 2021 Apertura. Then, a few months later, Atlas did something even more improbable: It won again. Back-to-back titles. Bicampeonato. A team that had waited seven decades suddenly had two stars in as many tournaments.

Quinones was central to that transformation. In the 2022 Clausura final against Pachuca, he scored in the first leg at Estadio Jalisco, giving Atlas a 2-0 advantage and pushing the club closer to a second straight title. It was the kind of moment that turned him from an important player into a forever figure.

That is why his return to Guadalajara on Thursday, when Mexico take on South Korea, will be a special moment. Quinones is no longer just the former Atlas forward; he is the Mexican national team’s World Cup spark, returning to a city that stores his best football memories.

Quinones gave Atlas supporters something many had only heard about from older generations. He gave them titles, and nights where the impossible stopped sounding like a joke. Now he is trying to do something similar for Mexico.

Quinones left a major footprint in Liga MX. Across spells with Tigres, Lobos BUAP, Atlas and America, he produced 75 goals and 20 assists in 206 league appearances. If you expand the frame to all competitions with Mexican first-division clubs, the number climbs to 88 goals.

More importantly, the goals brought with them medals. He won with Tigres. He became a 'bicampeon' with Atlas, and again with America. By the time he left for Al-Qadsiah in the summer of 2024, Quinones was no longer just an explosive forward with streaky brilliance; he was a winner, someone who had learned how to survive the emotional weight that comes with finals.

Then came Saudi Arabia, and with it, a different kind of validation.

Quinones joined Al-Qadsiah in a deal worth a reported $16 million, making him the most expensive sale in Liga MX history, and enjoyed an excellent debut season, scoring 25 goals across all competitions. That, though, was just the start.

In 2025-26, Quinones finished as the Saudi Pro League’s top scorer, with 33 goals in 31 matches, asa hat-trick against Al-Ittihad on the final day of the campaign allowed him to finish ahead of both Ivan Toney and Cristiano Ronaldo in the top-scorer standings. He added four goals in the King’s Cup, too, for good measure.

Not since the days of Hugo Sanchez has the national team been able to point to a Mexican forward who arrived at a World Cup with in that kind of goal-scoring form. The Saudi Pro League is not La Liga, and Quinones is not Hugo, but the feeling of the ball repeatedly finding the back of the net still matters.

It is rare to see a footballer make Estadio Azteca feel like his own backyard. The stadium usually swallows players before it embraces them. The altitude, the noise, the history, the expectation - it all presses down.

Quinones, though, looked comfortable from the first whistle against South Africa. He made things happen every time he touched the ball, was direct without being rushed, aggressive without being careless. He played like a man who understood the size of the moment but refused to let it make him smaller. When the chance came, he did what Mexico has needed its forwards to do for years: He finished.

That first changed the emotional temperature of the tournament. Mexico had been waiting for a release, and Quinones gave it one. Now, hopes of a deep run at a home tournament rely on him maintaining this level of performance.

The complexity of Quinones’ story is that it cannot be reduced to rejection or convenience. He is Colombian by birth and represented them at youth level. His people in Magui Payan remain part of his story, and he has not tried to erase them. But he has also been clear about Mexico.

"People who don’t know my story are always going to judge you," Quinones told ESPN MX. “But that really doesn’t matter. What matters is what I feel, and I feel a lot of love for Mexico.”

His mother, Gloria, understands it too: "It hurt me to leave him there," she told ESPN MX, “but I knew it was for his dream... No one is a prophet in his own land. When you have dreams to fulfil, you can go wherever you need to go, and there you can make them happen.”

That dream now has a World Cup goal attached to it. It has two countries watching. It has a Colombian mother, a Mexican shirt, a Saudi Golden Boot and a stadium that already feels like part of his personal map. The best version of Quinones may still be ahead in this tournament.