Henry Martín's Hat-Trick and the 'Curse': The Numbers Hidden Behind the Story in Liga MX

At the ground in Aguascalientes the only thing I wrote in my notebook at the final whistle was the scoreline: 2-4. The number that mattered arrived much later, at two in the morning, inside a scrolling comment thread. América supporters kept repeating one line: “A Bomba hat-trick is a curse for whoever concedes it.” Necaxa was the latest victim. Apertura 2026, Matchday 10. Henry Martín scored three, Miguel Borja put his name on the scoresheet, and Guillermo Almada's side walked off with four goals. The fans' logic was tidy — clubs that have faced a Martín hat-trick have, in time, slipped out of Liga MX's top division. That night I kept pausing the replay to watch one thing: when Martín leaves the pitch. The answer was almost always the same. He doesn't. I keep the tempo of the room before I ever write a word; that night the room was laughing, and the number was standing quietly in the corner.

Liga MX is Mexico's top professional division, played in two halves each year — Apertura and Clausura. The best eight teams of the regular phase enter the Liguilla, and the title is decided through a playoff. In that structure, “leaving the top division” is not as simple as it sounds. Promotion and relegation have been effectively frozen in Mexican football for several seasons, with a conditional return still under discussion. A smaller club can exit the top flight through more than one door: relegation, franchise relocation, financial dissolution. Bundle those mechanisms under a single label and any pattern starts to look like a curse, even when there is nothing supernatural inside it.

By institutional standing, América is the biggest and most successful club in Mexican football; Necaxa is far smaller. That asymmetry is what holds the story up. A giant's striker scores three against a small club, and the small club spends season after season fighting to survive. Structural economics explains far more here than football fate. The match itself was open: conceding twice while scoring four means the defending was not clean, and the attack bought the result. What Almada has is a sharp attack. What he lacks is control.

Look at Martín's season in numbers. Eight starts in eight matches, 659 minutes, six goals. That is an average of roughly 82.4 minutes per game — the coaching staff does not plan to substitute him. Normalised per 90 minutes, his scoring rate is 0.82. For the first-choice striker at a top-half top-flight club, that is genuinely strong. Here is the first warning: the number is good, but the sample is eight matches, and the source provides no xG or shot-quality data. If finishing variance built that rate, it will drift back toward the mean within weeks.

The second issue is age. A striker born in 2026 sits at roughly 33-34 within the Apertura 2026 timeline — the beginning of decline, the far edge of the peak. Scoring 0.82 per 90 at that age is remarkable, but history says the rate does not hold. And because he plays almost every minute, there is no rotation buffer. In a congested calendar, fatigue accumulates, and fatigue first arrives as injury, then as measured in metres.

The third issue is Borja. He scored in the same match and has been scoring through the season. That is not a trivial detail. The biggest risk at a big club is dependency on one man's goals; when the first-choice striker loses form or gets hurt, the entire attack stops. Borja's parallel scoring loosens that dependency. The question then shifts: is the team built around Martín, or is the team being built alongside him?

Now the curse itself. The pattern rests on three hat-tricks — three. In statistics, three events are not a trend; they are a coincidence being read as one. People who hunt for these connections often find that separate incidents, occurring at different times for different reasons, form a mysterious link once placed side by side. Relegation, ownership change, dissolution — the underlying causes are entirely distinct. This is apophenia: the brain loves patterns, especially when the structure underneath is complicated. The source report concedes the point itself.

Reading those fan threads, an old habit of mine returns. In Dhaka I learned that access is a chair offered at tea; in Mexico, that chair is a line in a comment section. The story supporters are building is part of their matchday participation. There is a commercial function here too. Martín is chasing the club's all-time scoring record, and this captain-striker chapter drives matchday attendance, shirt sales and broadcast retrospectives. Financially, a 33-34 year old striker carries a low resale value; his worth lives in sporting output and legacy, not in trading profit. The transfer market cannot price that kind of asset — just as it hesitates to spend a hundred million euros on a teenager with fewer than fifty senior appearances. Inexperience is appreciating while experience goes missing. That imbalance is the bigger story now, bigger than the hat-trick.

There is another layer, tied to live data. On nights like this, the bookmakers' feeds are at their busiest — every pass, every shot, every minute pushed into a market. The strange part is that the curse meme and the live-data market eat the same raw material: a tiny sample and a fast story. Where fans are joking, someone else is pricing. When emotion turns into numbers without verification, datafication shows its darkest face.

This is where the outside reading goes wrong. The outside reading says: a hat-trick means form, and form means consistency. The inside reading says: a hat-trick is a high-variance event, and the real question is not form but load — how many minutes and how much dependency rest on Martín's shoulders. Eight starts in eight games, 82 minutes per match, no substitution buffer; across a busy Apertura that slowly becomes risk. Nineteen years of watching matches tell me these risks never reach the headline. They appear on the lineup sheet and in the timing of a substitution. I count the pauses, not just the passes, because the story hides in the hush. My notebook fills in the quiet minutes between the whistle and the bus, and those gaps reveal where a team is leaning. Every locker room has a heartbeat; my job is to hear it without changing it. Martín's heartbeat is loud right now. The only question is how long it holds this rhythm.

Looking forward, watch a few things. First, whether Martín is withdrawn before the 70th minute — if he is, that is a fatigue-management signal. Second, the rolling expected-goals figure next to his goal count; if the two drift apart, the hat-trick was variance. Third, where América sits in the Liguilla race — a drop out of the playoff places raises the pressure on Almada. Fourth, the record chase — the closer it gets, the more active the legacy market becomes. And fifth, after the next hat-trick, watch whether another club leaves the top division. If it does, the fans will write about a curse again. The answer will still be in the ledger of structure, not the ledger of fate.