Julián Quiñones scored three goals for Al Qadsiah against Al Ittihad on Thursday, May 21, producing a hat-trick in the Saudi Pro League's final match and emerging as the competition's pichichi.
The sequence began with a penalty converted at the 35th minute. Seconds after Al Ittihad restarted play following that spot kick, Quiñones struck again, and he completed the treble to finish the night with three goals for Al Qadsiah.
The numbers matter: it was a hat-trick in the season closer, and it came while Quiñones had been chasing Ivan Toney in the scoring table — Toney had led the race with 31 goals in the supplementary article — a gap Quiñones erased to claim the pichichi by the final whistle.
Quiñones's run capped a prolific 2025-26 football year. A recent profile listed him with 30 goals in 30 matches and said he had 30 goals in the season, while club form had been building since he opened the scoring in a 2-0 win over Al-Hazm that began a four-match winning streak for Al Qadsiah.
Market valuations underline the moment: Transfermarkt put Quiñones at 12 million euros in the Yahoo article, and reports note he left Liga MX in summer 2024 with a valuation of 10 million euros. At club level he has reunited with attacking partners Mateo Retegui and Otávio under Brendan Rodgers, and the Yahoo article described him as being in the best sporting and market moment of his career and a candidate to move to Europe in the summer.
Off the club stage, Quiñones's rise has national-team implications. FIFA accepted his change of nationality in 2023 and cleared him to play for Mexico; he is on Javier Aguirre's preliminary list of 55 players for the 2026 World Cup. That list, and the timing of his late-season surge, give fresh weight to selectors' decisions ahead of the tournament.
There is a tension between club explosiveness and earlier national-team output. The Yahoo piece also noted Quiñones had two goals and two assists in 20 matches under Jaime Lozano and Javier Aguirre, a modest return compared with his one-goal-per-game scoring rate at Al Qadsiah. That contrast is the friction point: prolific club form versus uneven production in Mexico's shirt.
Quiñones himself framed the moment simply and in Spanish: "Nací listo para todo tipo de retos. A veces no se dan las cosas, pero ahora más que nunca me siento con la confianza de levantar a la selección." The hat-trick and the pichichi crown hand him a narrative he can take to national camp and to any future transfer talks.
The consequence is immediate: selectors heading into the 2026 World Cup cycle must weigh a player arriving with the league's golden boot and a late-season hat-trick against his earlier international returns; for Quiñones, the May 21 performance is the clearest argument yet that his club form demands a place in the conversation.
