Josef Martinez Returns to MLS Spotlight With Columbus Crew Signing

Columbus Crew have signed Josef Martinez, bringing one of the most prolific scorers in MLS history back to Ohio as the club fights to climb into a playoff position with less than three months left in the regular season.

The 33-year-old Venezuelan international is under contract through the 2026 campaign, with an option for the 2027 Sprint Season. He arrives after a stint with Liga MX side Club Tijuana, which followed a 2025 season spent with the San Jose Earthquakes.

For a player who has now worn six different jerseys across two countries in the years following his MLS debut in 2017, the move represents another chapter in a career that has refused to slow down even as the goals have come less frequently than they did in his record-setting years in Atlanta.

A career built on goals

Martinez’s 130 regular-season goals rank sixth all-time in MLS history. He has played 214 games across nine MLS seasons, a run that has taken him from Atlanta United (2017-22) to Inter Miami CF (2023), CF Montreal (2024) and San Jose (2025).

“Josef brings a level of experience, proven production and competitive mentality that can make a real difference for our group,” said Crew general manager Issa Tall. “He adds another dynamic element to our attack, while also bringing leadership and valuable experience to our roster, especially given his familiarity with our team’s style of play and the league.”

The Atlanta years

Martinez is best known for his tenure at Atlanta United, where he became one of the most prolific scorers the league has ever seen. His 2018 season remains a franchise-defining campaign: 31 goals in the regular season alone, enough to win him the MLS Golden Boot and the Landon Donovan MLS MVP award. He added four more goals in that year’s playoff run, breaking the league’s combined single-season scoring record with 35 in all competitions and helping Atlanta lift the only MLS Cup in the club’s history, a 2-0 win over the Portland Timbers in which he scored the opener and set up the second. That final drew 73,019 fans to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a record for MLS Cup and the largest crowd for any standalone match in league history, a fitting stage for the finish to Martinez’s best season.

That season made Martinez the first player in league history to win the All-Star Game MVP, the regular-season MVP and the MLS Cup MVP awards in the same year. He finished his Atlanta career with six career hat tricks, an MLS record, three of them coming in that single 2018 campaign.

His numbers after leaving Atlanta have never come close to matching that peak, but they show a player who has kept finding the net wherever he lands. He scored seven goals in 27 MLS games for Inter Miami in 2023, part of a 12-goal haul across all competitions that included a Leagues Cup title with the club, before his move to Montreal produced 11 goals and three assists in 23 MLS appearances in 2024. Last year at San Jose, he made 31 appearances and scored 14 goals with three assists, numbers that helped convince Columbus he still has scoring left in him even as he heads toward his mid-thirties.

A well-traveled second act

Life after Atlanta United took Martinez to three different MLS clubs in three years, then out of the league entirely for a season in Mexico. Along the way he added to an already crowded trophy case: a three-time MLS Best XI honoree and a two-time MLS All-Star, credentials that put him among the most decorated attacking players of his generation in North America. That stretch of moves, five clubs across eight years after leaving Atlanta, reflects both his continued value as a scoring option off the back of a proven track record and the reality that few teams have wanted to commit to him as a long-term starter once he passed 30.

The move to Columbus reunites Martinez with interim head coach Laurent Courtois, who coached him at Montreal in 2024. That familiarity should shorten any adjustment period for a player joining his fifth different MLS club, at a point in the season when Martinez has little time to make an impact.

Filling a gap up front

Columbus lost Designated Player Wessam Abou Ali to a season-ending ACL injury in April, leaving a hole in the striker group that the club has been trying to fill from that point forward. Martinez’s arrival gives Courtois another proven scoring option heading into the stretch run, even at an age when his role is likely to be managed carefully across a compressed schedule.

He continues what has been a busy transfer window for the Crew, whose other additions this summer include midfielder Brais Mendez, defender Eric Bailly and forward Gonzalo Tapia. Columbus currently sit 11th in the Eastern Conference with 20 points from 18 matches, outside the playoff positions with work to do to climb back into contention.

A club with a recent winning habit

Columbus arrive at this stretch of the season as one of the most decorated clubs in MLS over the last five years, though this particular campaign has been a struggle. The Crew won their third MLS Cup in club history in December 2023, beating LAFC 2-1 at Lower.com Field in front of a stadium-record 20,802 fans, with Cucho Hernandez and Yaw Yeboah scoring inside the opening 37 minutes before a late Denis Bouanga reply for LAFC made for a nervous finish. That title, added to championships in 2008 and 2020, put Columbus alongside the LA Galaxy and D.C. United as the only clubs to win at least three MLS Cups.

The Crew followed that up with a Leagues Cup title in 2024, giving the club a genuine claim to being the league’s dominant side across recent seasons even as the current group works to translate that pedigree into a playoff spot this year. Martinez arrives into a locker room that remembers what it takes to win trophies, though the current standings do not yet reflect it.

The Designated Player calculation

Martinez’s arrival also carries roster-building implications beyond the pitch. Signings completed in the secondary transfer window, which runs from mid-July through early September, typically carry a lower Designated Player budget charge than deals struck earlier in the year, making a short-term addition like this one more manageable for a club balancing its books against three existing Designated Player slots. For Columbus, adding proven MLS scoring depth without disturbing the core of Diego Rossi, Daniel Gazdag and the rest of the roster built around Courtois represents a low-cost swing at fixing an obvious problem.

The bigger question is whether a 33-year-old, however decorated, can still deliver at the pace MLS now demands. Martinez’s goal return has trended downward year on year from his Atlanta peak, but it has never collapsed, and a front office desperate for reinforcements after losing Abou Ali evidently decided proven production, even diminished, beats gambling on an unknown.

What Martinez still has to offer

Martinez’s career has not been without setbacks. A torn ACL suffered in the 2020 season opener cost him almost a full year at the peak of his career, and the striker who returns to MLS with Columbus is a different, more seasoned version of the player who terrorized defenses at his physical peak. But the underlying numbers, 130 goals across nine seasons in the league, a Golden Boot, an MVP award and an MLS Cup, speak to a scoring instinct that rarely disappears entirely.

For a Venezuela international who has represented his country at multiple Copa America tournaments across his career, the move to Columbus is also a chance to keep his name in the conversation domestically ahead of whatever comes next internationally. For Columbus, it is a low-risk swing at adding a proven finisher in the exact stretch of the calendar when playoff races are decided by moments a player like Martinez has built his reputation on delivering.

Whether he can still produce at the level that once made him the most feared striker in the league remains to be seen, but few forwards arriving in MLS this summer carry a resume that matches his.

Columbus have 16 regular-season games left to close the gap on the playoff line, a stretch that will include road trips through the heart of the Eastern Conference and a home slate at Lower.com Field, where the club has built its recent championship history. Martinez will not solve every problem in a Crew attack that has underperformed its 2023 and 2024 standard, but a proven finisher with his track record gives Courtois another weapon to call on when games are tight.

Columbus fans hoping for a spark up front, and a reason to believe in a playoff push, will find out soon enough whether this reunion with the league pays off.