Guillermo Ochoa, the goalkeeper who was a fixture of the Mexican national team for the better part of two decades, announced his retirement on Tuesday at 41, according to ABC7. It closes a 22-year professional career that began in February 2004 with Club América.

The record that defines the career

The number that sets Ochoa apart is six: he was named to six World Cup squads. That is a total matched by only two other players in the history of the sport, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, which places a Mexican goalkeeper in company usually reserved for the game's most decorated attackers.

Being selected and playing are different things, and Ochoa's six call-ups break down honestly. He was the starting goalkeeper at three of them, Brazil 2014, Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, and it was at Brazil 2014, with a run of saves against the host nation, that he became a global name. At the 2026 World Cup he was a backup, appearing only for the final 13 minutes of a match against the Czech Republic. Longevity, not just peak, is the story: to be good enough to make six squads across 22 years is its own rare feat.

Club and country

Ochoa's club career took the long, winding path of a goalkeeper chasing playing time across continents. After his years at Club América, where he had two spells (2004-2011 and 2019-2022) and won a Liga MX title in the 2005 Clausura, he played in France with Ajaccio, in Spain with Málaga and Granada, in Belgium with Standard Liège, where he won the Belgian Cup, and in Italy with Salernitana, before later stops that included Portugal and Cyprus.

For Mexico, the trophies came mostly in the regional game: six CONCACAF Gold Cup titles, the kind of consistent international winning that a long national-team career is built on. He also won a bronze medal with Mexico at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Why it lands in Los Angeles

Mexican soccer is not foreign sport in Los Angeles; it is home sport. The national team plays to enormous crowds here, and for a large share of Angelenos, Ochoa was simply the goalkeeper, the face in front of the net through World Cup after World Cup. A retirement like this is felt in this city the way a hometown team's captain hanging it up is felt elsewhere.

"I gave it my all; I left everything on the field for my clubs and the national team, and today I hang up my gloves," Ochoa said. After 22 years and six World Cups, it is a plain sentence for an unusually long career, and the end of an era for the many in Los Angeles who grew up watching him keep goal.