There doesn’t seem to be much romance in football anymore, does there? Leicester City and Jamie Vardy’s tandem rise to the top of English football is almost a decade old and within a matter of seasons they were relegated out of the Premier League once more. After their immediate return to the top flight was secured, the 2016 fairytale title win felt like a distant memory. The narrative now was all about Financial Fair Play and whether they would be able to comply and compete or face life back in the top flight served with a side dish of a points deduction.
Going back just a decade further into the ‘noughties’ and the romance seemed even more sparse. England’s top flight was dominated by Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea with six, two, and two league titles each, but September 2024 has begun with a social media wave of nostalgia for the era. Barclaysmen, they’ve called it. You can’t scroll the full length of your screen on Football Twitter without seeing a compilation of someone like Rory Delap or James Beattie set to some early 2000s chart music.
So is the romance dead or is this just another example of the ‘Golden Age’ phenomenon?
Succinctly summarised by Michael Sheen’s Paul character in 2011 rom-com Midnight in Paris, ‘Golden Age Thinking’ is “the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in—it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”
If you like your philosophising like you like your unromantic football (backed with data), Swedish historian Johan Norberg pointed out that “a U.S. poll found that people born in the 1930s and 1940s thought the 1950s was America’s best decade, while those born in the 1960s and 1970s preferred the 1980s.” In a Wall Street Journal article, Norberg summarised this as “historical nostalgia…coloured by personal nostalgia.”
But if you, like me, prefer your philosophising to come at you like a pearl of wisdom from the old fella at the end of the bar, Twitter user @flameosumeet has your back.
“You don’t miss 2000s Barclays. You miss being a kid and watching sports without responsibilities. You miss coming home from school and playing FIFA with your friends. You miss watching sports free of Twitter agendas. We’re all adults now and the economy is crap and everything is expensive and you can’t drown yourself in sports anymore because you’re worried about a million other things. That’s all this is.”
So, I want to bring you a modern romance story from football. I want to bring you a rags-to-riches rollercoaster you’re probably not familiar with. It’s not a Hollywood actor taking a Welsh club up the football pyramid or Endrick’s PR team telling you a heartwarming story about his favourite program as a kid being He-Man despite the fact it ended 21 years before he was born (or something equally unbelievable).
It’s about a boy whose first professional club didn’t even exist when he was born in 1994, nor did his second, and nor did his third. About a player whose international debut didn’t come until two months’ shy of his 27th birthday. It’s a story—not identical to but—with parallels to one of modern football’s other romance stories, N’Golo Kante.
This is the narrated timeline of Jose ‘El Brujo’ Martinez.
Let’s start at the beginning of El Brujo’s late-blooming ascendancy: a story that needs to be heard by many young professional footballers chomping at the bit to get going, because, after all, for every Lamine Yamal winning the Euros and a Ballon d’Or nomination at the age of 17, there is a Kalvin Phillips making his Premier League debut at nearly 25 (but still becoming just the third player ever to debut for England before playing in the top flight).
In 2014, Jose Martinez was a gangly but by no means tall 19 year old playing in the Venezuelan Third Division for ULA FC. Despite their historic past, they were languishing in the Venezuelan fourth tier, a competition without professional status. It’s likely nobody outside of Venezuela had ever heard his name before. Patrolling the midfield with what would become trademark aggression and energy, he wouldn’t remain in the wilderness for long.
A season later, by now 2015, Martinez debuted in the Second Division with JBL Zulia. It was technically two steps up due to the existence of a Segunda B league and now the tough tackler was 20 years old. The campaign would end in triumph for both club and player as they earned promotion to the Venezuelan Primera Division. As Martinez would tell my FUTVE English counterpart Dominic Bisogno five years later, his successes with JBL Zulia and later Zulia FC carry a special place in his heart.
“For me, Maracaibo [the state capital of Zulia] is very important, not only because I played there, but because I was also born there and what I was able to achieve there in a short period of time.”
At the age of 21 years and 5 months, Martinez made his long-awaited debut in Venezuela’s Liga FUTVE. For a country with a hollow middle when it comes to player ages and for 14 years a league that insisted all teams always had a teenager on the pitch, it was an uncharacteristically late start to life at the top. He captained the side on numerous occasions in his debut season as JBL Zulia retained their Primera credentials. Brujo chipped in with two goals and an assist across 32 games, a Goal Involvement return he to-date has bettered only once.
One more season with JBL Zulia was on the cards, in which he continued to solidify his tough guy persona that would later turn him into an overseas cult hero. Seven yellow cards in his debut Liga FUTVE season was ‘bettered’ in 2017 when he picked up just six yellow cards but two straight reds. It was somewhat of a false dawn, however, because he’s only ever picked up two red cards in the seven seasons since, only one of which was straight.
It was something he would later have to address, but first a cross-state move to Zulia FC beckoned, as did some history in the making.
For the 2018 season, Martinez signed for Zulia FC, founded eight years before JBL Zulia in 2005. With JBL Zulia relegated at the end of 2017, this kept the local boy done good in the Primera Division. Promotions aside, it was also to prove his first taste of silverware as the Negriazul won the Copa Venezuela with Martinez not missing a minute of the two-legged final. The cup victory also meant Zulia FC had qualified for the 2019 Copa Sudamericana, their one and only participation in the competition.
He would soon be turning 25. For clubs outside of Latin America, many of whom adopt an U23 policy when recruiting from the region, the door was closing on Martinez’s chances of making a name for himself on foreign shores, not that he was seeing it that way.
“You will never know your limits if you don’t push yourself to them,” he told FUTVE English 18 months later—and a lot would change in that time.
Continental football, and no more than a year of it, would prove to be Martinez’s window to the world. Zulia went further than any Venezuelan team had ever been in the competition and Brujo was ever-present. And there’s no word as fitting as that, either.
In the first round, playing away to Real Potosi of Bolivia at 3,885m above sea level, Zulia became only the second-ever foreign team to beat them there. The goal came in 90+2 and it was almost entirely Martinez’s doing. On his continental debut, he made a crucial interception on the edge of his own box and pounded his way up field, leaving most panting and gasping for air after a brutal 90 minutes. His endless energy created a 2v1 situation and his accompanying teammate Brayan Moya tapped in Martinez’s square ball before promptly cramping up.
Brujo was subbed just once as Zulia made the quarterfinals, where they exited to Argentina’s Colon 4-1 on aggregate after winning the first leg 1-0 at home.
“I feel very good [about the legacy I left] because I think that since arriving, I was able to develop my football, make myself known, and play in the Copa Sudamericana. We reached the quarter-finals, which no Venezuelan team had done before.”
It was somewhat of a curtain call for Martinez. He would play just 14 more times for Zulia as they finished 14th out of 19 in the Clausura before new horizons called.
In 2020, aged 25 and after making 121 appearances in Liga FUTVE, Jose Martinez moved abroad for the first time. MLS club Philadelphia Union signed him for a reported $600k and he would soon become the blueprint for a defensive midfielder in the league. When clubs went looking for a new one, they would soon be saying ‘bring me a Brujo’.
“I felt strange when I got here because I had never seen so many good things in one place,” he told FUTVE English eight months into his time in Philadelphia. “For me, it was important to join the club, they welcomed me in the best way.”
Three yellow cards came in his first three games, with the third resulting in a one game suspension. A fourth would come in his fifth game. His legacy was already formulating, as Union podcaster Todd Lewis told me.
“The Brujo Martínez story starts at LAFC [his debut] with blood running down his face, and then COVID happens…he comes back a completely different player—transformed.”
The injury obtained by throwing himself into a challenge and receiving a boot to the face initiated his eventual cult status. He would earn four more yellow cards throughout the rest of his debut season with Philadelphia Union and go on to collect 38 more and two red cards in the next three and a half years.
But, while his battling nature was inarguably a defining feature of his game, it was not the only one. As Todd continued describing Martinez, “people did him a disservice from 2021-2023. He was arguably the best defensive midfielder in all of MLS because of his defensive work rate, he worked tirelessly off the ball. The engine on him is unreal. Nobody has been close to him.
“One thing I noticed as the years went on about his game, he is kind of like a deep-lying, playmaking #6 who plays those diagonal balls from left to right and he has that passing range on him which I hadn’t seen since Haris Medunjanin.”
Eighteen months into his Philadelphia Union career, Martinez, just over two months’ shy of his 27th birthday, received his national team debut under Portuguese Head Coach Jose Peseiro. For his whole career he had been a late bloomer at young clubs, but his boundless effort and indefatigable mindset was carrying him further than anyone could have expected.
That same year, 2021, he would, to many inexplicably, miss out on the MLS All-Star Team. However, interest from Europe was also established, and all of this was justification for a stellar opening to his MLS career, which included the Supporter’s Shield and a nomination for Best MLS Newcomer in 2020.
Off the pitch, Martinez cemented his status as a fan favourite, both for The Union and among Venezuelans. During the 2021 Christmas break, he returned home to Maracaibo and showered the local children with gifts, including, of course, a healthy amount of footballs. Just after the New Year, again with the help of Venezuelan influencer Manuel Conecta, Martinez was going viral for all the right reasons once more.
A young boy in Maracaibo lost all his worldly possessions in a house fire but saved his little brother from the inferno in the process. Together with Manuel, Martinez restocked the boy’s house like never before with fans, a fridge freezer, other white goods, and a HD TV.
Heading into 2022, now 27 and starting his third season in MLS, the league’s official podcast named him in their ‘Top Five’ defensive midfielders. His head coach politely disagreed: “He is the best #6 in MLS right now…if you look at what we ask him to do, the importance of what he brings to our formation. We ask him to take away the opposition #10, week in and week out, and he does that as well as anybody.”
The stats agreed. Towards the end of the previous season, he was the league leader in his position for Challenges Won and Tackles Won, and ranked second for Ball Recoveries and fourth for Interceptions. Although The Union finished the season trophyless, he made the Official MLS Combined XI ahead of the MLS Cup Final 2022 alongside the likes of Giorgio Chiellini and Carlos Vela.
Once again, interest from Europe was rebuffed by his MLS club, this time from Turkish giants Besiktas, confirmed at the time by MLS journalist Tom Bogert. It didn’t deter Martinez, though, who just kept getting better. He scored his first and only three goals for Philadelphia Union, all bangers, and got a career-high 12 yellow cards. The crowning moment, however, was his long-awaited inclusion in the MLS All-Star team. His 2023 spot came courtesy of Head Coach Wayne Rooney who handpicked El Brujo himself.
Since making his national team debut in 2021, Martinez had decked himself in la Vinotinto 32 times. He had earned his right to an MLS move when the odds were against him. Then he took the platform MLS gave him and forced his way into a busy national team midfield, too. After two opportunities to move onwards and upwards again, it was to be third time lucky. In the mid-year transfer window of 2024, Martinez was granted his desire to move on with a stated desire to one day return.
In August 2024, 30-year-old Jose Martinez signed for Brazilian giants Corinthians. All of this was unthinkable just five years ago because five years ago, El Brujo was a 25 year old who had never played outside of Liga FUTVE and was yet to debut for the national team. Nine years ago, at the age of 21, he still hadn’t debuted in Liga FUTVE. And two years before that as a 19 year old, he was playing in Venezuela’s Third Division. As I said, unthinkable.
Two weeks after he departed the pitch of Philadelphia Union’s Suburu Park for the last time to a standing ovation, he left the pitch of Corinthian’s Itaquerão for the first time to a standing ovation. And of course he had received a yellow card, too.
