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Raul Jimenez shouldn’t be playing at the World Cup today.
He shouldn’t be leading the line for Mexico in their joint-home tournament, as a player with 126 caps and 45 goals to his name. He shouldn’t even be playing football… and he probably shouldn’t still be alive.
“It is a miracle to be here with you,” Jimenez said when reflecting on the moment that almost ended his life.
It has been almost six years since the striker suffered a life-threatening skull fracture while playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers against Arsenal.
The fact he not only survived but also resumed his football career and managed to get back to the level he previously reached — i.e. a regular goalscorer in the Premier League and at international level — feels like another miracle in itself.
It’s been quite a journey — and today’s World Cup curtain-raiser between Mexico and South Africa at the Mexico City Stadium (kick-off 8pm UK time; 3pm ET) represents Jimenez’s crowning achievement.
He doesn’t remember going back for the corner that would change his life.
Jimenez, then aged 29 and in the prime of his career as a complete No 9 who had thrived in English football and had recently been linked with Manchester United and Barcelona, jogged back to mark the near post, as he always did, when Wolves were defending a corner at the Emirates Stadium.
It’s perhaps just as well he can’t remember, as those who witnessed — or, more to the point, heard — the sound of Jimenez’s head clashing with that of Arsenal’s David Luiz at full force as the pair jumped for the ball was sickening. It sounded more akin to the ball striking against the frame of a goal, a hideous noise exacerbated by the game being played in an empty stadium during Covid restrictions.
“There are things that you are able to put away from your memories but this moment will stay forever,” Nuno Espirito Santo, Wolves’ manager at the time, later said in the documentary Code Red.
“His eyes were shut and he had a little bit of blood running from his nose,” team-mate Conor Coady, who immediately thought to keep Jimenez lying on his side in those crucial early seconds before the medical staff arrived on the scene, said on the same documentary. “I could see he was done. He was out.”
Jimenez was rushed to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, where he underwent surgery to save his life, with surgeons relieving pressure on his brain. Without the instant attention he received from specialist medical staff on the pitch, who were then able to get him to hospital as quickly as possible, the consequences do not bear thinking about.
Jimenez is carried off on a stretcher from the pitch at Arsenal in 2020 (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
“The skull fracture… the bone broke, and there was a little bit of bleeding inside the brain,” Jimenez said. “It was pushing my brain to the inside, and that is why the surgery had to be quick.”
For his team-mates, colleagues, friends and loved ones, those hours not knowing his condition, or then days and weeks not knowing how strong his recovery would be, just as a human not as a footballer, were, as Coady put it, “no man’s land”.
A message in the team WhatsApp chat 24 hours after his surgery, in which Jimenez said he was OK and being looked after, came as a huge, welcome surprise. Then, the recovery began.
Incredibly, just two weeks later, he visited the rest of the squad at the training ground, looking pale, unsteady and wearing a big hat to cover the scar he will bear for the rest of his life.
A few weeks after, he was doing keepy-uppies, walking his dog and playing catch. He was also unbalanced and needed to sleep a lot.
Then, he returned to training; at first on his own, then in small matches, but with absolutely no contact with his team-mates and he wasn’t allowed inside the penalty area. “It was like I was the best player in the world — I could dribble past anyone and no one could catch me,” Jimenez later joked.
Along the way, he had unstinting support from the club, the wider football world and through regular contact with former Chelsea and Arsenal goalkeeper Petr Cech, who had gone through a similar ordeal and had to wear protective headgear thereafter.
Gradually, after heading foam balls, then plastic ones and then, six months after the incident, proper footballs, Jimenez was back in full training, wearing a headband that he has donned for the rest of his career (well, a gradually modified one that was thick at first but it is now thin, lightweight and barely noticeable), and was back playing again.
Jimenez and the protective headband he wore in 2021 (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
That first Wolves goal was special. It came in his sixth appearance after his comeback, the winning goal in a Premier League match at Southampton.
Jimenez saw off three challenges and found the net in front of an ecstatic away end. He jumped, he roared, he unleashed a tide of emotion.
A couple of weeks later came his first Mexico goal for almost a year, against El Salvador.
However, things weren’t quite the same. How could they be? Jimenez looked to have lost confidence, particularly in his heading ability, with his headband negatively impacting the direction and power he could place on the ball.
In the latter stages of one particularly frustrating match against Brentford, after missing a header, he tore it off his head and threw it to the floor, playing on without it (Wolves were horrified… not least for insurance purposes).
Jimenez struggled for form and was dropped from the team. The following season (2022-23), he failed to score a single Premier League goal in 15 appearances and left Molineux that summer a seemingly broken player.
Jimenez pictured without his headband in Wolves’ loss to Brentford in September 2021 (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
It was at Fulham, under Marco Silva, where Jimenez’s career was rejuvenated. Jimenez’s game changed, from the all-action, full-throttle No 9 that had led Wolves to European football for the first time in four decades to a player relying more on two of his key attributes: technical ability and work rate.
The goals returned, particularly in 2024-25 when he netted 18 times for club and country, helping Mexico win the Concacaf Gold Cup at the end of that campaign with three goals (including one in the final against the United States). He was named in the team of the tournament. A year earlier, he had been the top scorer (with five) in the Concacaf Nations League, scoring both goals in the final against Panama, including a 92nd-minute winner.
That winning goal came from the penalty spot, and Jimenez’s record of 31 goals in 115 games at Fulham included nine penalties, which extended his record-breaking perfect run of having never missed a Premier League penalty (he has a 100 per cent record of 14 taken, 14 scored)
Jimenez is third in Mexico’s all-time goalscorer list with 43 (Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images)
At domestic level, he often kept Brazilian striker Rodrigo Muniz out of the team at Fulham, while for Mexico, he is often preferred to Milan’s Santiago Gimenez.
This, plus the accolades, the goals, it’s all testament to Jimenez’s dedication to his craft over a prolonged period of time.
As his club career comes full circle with a shock return to Wolves this week, signing a two-year contract to play in the Championship (an indicator of the emotional pull Molineux has for him, with Jimenez clearly still performing well enough to play at a higher level), Jimenez still has plenty to offer the sport.
He has unfinished business there. And with Mexico?
Today perhaps represents the pinnacle of an extraordinary career and journey, from a horrific, near-death experience to playing for Mexico at a home World Cup in front of an adoring, feverish crowd at Estadio Azteca.
“I’m really excited; the whole country is like this,” he told Fulham’s official website recently. “I’m feeling we can make history: for us, for Mexican football and for Mexican history.”
“It helps you stop and think about things you have never thought about before,” Jimenez previously said about what changed him after his near-death experience. “And maybe — although I always do — to enjoy more what you do. Live life in the moment at 100 per cent.”
It feels impossible not to root for him.
