Santiago Giménez will finally walk into a World Cup with Mexico in 2026, and he does it at 25 as one of the team’s most important players. After being left out of Qatar 2022, he now stands at the center of a campaign that begins for Mexico against Sudáfrica at Estadio Azteca.
That is why his name keeps coming up now. Giménez was born in Buenos Aires in 2001, moved to Mexico in 2004 because of his father’s work and chose the Tricolor path for his international future. Javier Aguirre has made clear he sees something different in him, saying he trusts him, that he lacked only one point and already has it, and that he is ready to attack space, play facing goal or with his back to it.
For Colo Colo fans, the surname also carries old pain. Christian Giménez, Santiago’s father, scored the 2-1 goal for Pachuca in the 2006 Copa Sudamericana final, a result remembered as one of the most painful defeats in Colo Colo history. Christian Giménez built his career in Mexico with América, Pachuca and Cruz Azul, later naturalizing and playing for Mexico. The family name is tied to both sides of the border between Argentina and Mexico, and now the son is the one carrying it into a World Cup.
But the road to that debut has not been clean. Aguirre said Santiago Giménez did not arrive with his best competitive rhythm, and that matters because he spent almost the whole year as a substitute at Milan. He did not start Mexico’s match against Corea del Sur and entered only in the final stretch, in a game tied to qualification for the round of 16. Mexico still has Sudáfrica next, but the larger question is no longer whether Giménez belongs on this stage; it is how much of it he will be able to influence once the World Cup starts for real.
