"Todo Pasa, Todo Llega": How Lucas Hoyos Found His Way to Atlanta and Tata Martino
Lucas Hoyos got a phone call from Tata Martino, an invite to play for him, without knowing which club it was for.
Martino did not say. He talked about a project, about a process, and asked Hoyos to be part of it. Hoyos said yes before he knew where he was saying yes to.
"He was inviting me and I didn't hesitate," Hoyos said. "I wanted him to be the one directing me, and it makes me really happy that he came looking for me. It turned out we came to this beautiful club, but I didn't know that yet. The decision was already made, that I was coming to wherever he was."
The club turned out to be Atlanta United. In the way Hoyos tells it, that detail arrived almost as an afterthought.
To understand why a 37-year-old goalkeeper would agree to uproot his family for a stranger's process before learning the destination, it helps to go back to Mendoza, where a Boca-supporting grandmother kept telling her grandson to watch the club, and, in doing so, introduced him to Óscar Córdoba.
A Boy in Mendoza, Watching Córdoba Fly
Hoyos was 13 when he left home, moving into a 'pensión', the shared housing academies in Argentina use for young players chasing a career. He had already decided, he says, that he wanted to reach the first division.
At 17, another decision arrived. Hoyos had finished secondary school and completed the paperwork to begin studying to be a physical education teacher. Then his first professional contract came.
Soccer won.
While all of that was happening, he was also becoming a certain kind of goalkeeper, and one of his clearest templates came from Boca.
One of Hoyos' grandmothers was a Boca supporter, and she kept telling him to watch.
"She'd tell me, watch Boca, watch Boca, and I watched Boca," Hoyos said. "And right around that time Óscar Córdoba was flying."
He was not drawn to Córdoba simply because of the spectacular save. It was the smaller details.
"What I loved about Córdoba was that he was technical, very technical," Hoyos said. "I loved how he struck the ball, how he kicked it. I liked his style, his whole way of doing things."
Asked about René Higuita and Jorge Campos, two of the most recognizable goalkeepers of that era known for being risk-takers, Hoyos is polite but plain about it.
"I saw little of Higuita, a bit more of Jorge Campos, but they didn't excite me, with all the respect they deserve," he said.
Part of that was circumstance. Growing up in Mendoza, before every league and every goalkeeper was available on demand, television access was narrower.
"Not everyone could pay for cable," Hoyos said.
Boca and River were among the clubs he could see regularly, and his grandmother made sure Boca was one of them. At exactly that moment, Córdoba was in goal.
That early attraction to technique over theater would eventually describe Hoyos' own game, too.
He calls his comfort with the ball at his feet "partly a natural characteristic," but one sharpened through repetition. By his own account, he is a better distributor now than he was at 25 or 26.
And as the years passed, another part of the position grew more important to him.
"I think personally, as the years go by, you learn to read the game a little more," Hoyos said. "In these last years of football, you read the game even more. Personally, I like to live the game. I like to read the game a little."
That approach carries risk. Hoyos knows it.
"It's risky, yes, but it's a characteristic," he said. "Sometimes it works in your favor. Personally, for me, I think it always works in my favor, but it also depends on how you build your career."
For a long stretch of that career, he would have to build it somewhere other than Newell's.
The Long Way Around
Hoyos came through the Newell's system but left Rosario in search of senior football.
San Martín de Tucumán. Gimnasia y Esgrima de Jujuy. Instituto. Atlético de Rafaela. Instituto again.
Gimnasia de Jujuy, he says, was where he began to understand that he really could reach the first division.
Then came Vélez Sarsfield in 2018.
"Vélez was a turning point in my career," Hoyos said. Gabriel Heinze was there, building a team in which the goalkeeper was part of the first line of possession rather than simply the last line of defense. Hoyos fit that idea.
"The values that Heinze tried to instill in me personally, I remember very well," Hoyos said, "because it's a club that gave me a lot."
It was another version of the same goalkeeper identity he had been building for years: technique, participation, reading, decision-making.
Away from goal, Hoyos talks about music in similar terms of mood and identity.
He likes AC/DC, but Argentine rock is closer to the center of his taste. He describes music less by genre than by emotional state, slower rock when he is reflective, something more energetic when he is happy or when a song takes him back to a particular person or memory.
His style away from the field carries some of the same influences. Hoyos has long liked the rockero and skate aesthetic, even if his own attempt at skateboarding ended quickly after a fall. His children skate. He likes the clothes, the culture, the look.
The pattern is familiar.
Take in what speaks to you. Keep the pieces that fit. Eventually, the influence becomes your own.
Coming Home
In December 2022, Hoyos returned to Newell's at Heinze's request.
It was the club that had raised him, the club he supported, but also the club where he had never established himself as the first-team goalkeeper.
He came back as something very different from the player who had left.
The return was not immediately smooth. In the 2023 opener against Platense, Hoyos endured a difficult match. Heinze's trust did not change.
After Newell's beat Hoyos' former club Vélez in the next home match, La Capital reported that Heinze ran onto the field at the final whistle to embrace "su arquero, su apuesta", his goalkeeper, his bet.
Within weeks, Hoyos was producing the kind of performances that justified the faith. Against Colón, he denied Jorge Benítez one-on-one and later saved his penalty. La Capital wrote that Hoyos gave the team "seguridad" and "personalidad", security and personality.
And from the beginning, Heinze had given him more than the goal.
He gave him the armband.
Hoyos regularly led Newell's onto the field as captain, yielding it when Pablo Pérez, one of the club's most identifiable veteran figures, entered the match. La Capital described the captaincy as evidence of Hoyos' standing within the squad.
Hoyos describes it more simply.
"Pride and a great responsibility," he said.
He had lived inside Newell's since he was young. He understood, he said, a magnitude that can be difficult for players arriving from outside to immediately grasp.
"I lived what it's like on the inside from a young age," Hoyos said. "What happens to a lot of players is they don't understand the magnitude of the institution. It's enormous. Its fans are something else. For me it was pride and responsibility."
There was another layer to it.
His wife and children were Newell's supporters too. His children finally got to watch their father wear the shirt they supported.
"Probably today I don't value it as much as I should, because when things are happening you don't value anything," Hoyos said. "But I'm sure that in two or three years I'll value it much more."
There was a football symmetry to the return as well.
In Heinze's system, Hoyos was still being asked to participate aggressively with the ball. During a June 2023 draw against Huracán, La Capital praised his distribution and described him as a "falso líbero", a false sweeper.
It is hard not to see the echo of Córdoba there: a goalkeeper influencing the match through technique, positioning and participation before the spectacular save is ever required.
Five Coaches, One Responsibility
By November 2024, Newell's had gone through five coaches that year.
Hoyos was one of the senior players left to answer for it.
"Five coaches have come and gone at Newell's, we have to take responsibility," he told reporters.
He pointed the responsibility toward the veterans.
"The younger guys are giving everything, more than they can give," he said. "The ones who have to take responsibility here are us, the older ones."
Seven days later, on November 26, 2024, his season, and potentially much more, changed. Newell's beat Independiente 2-1 that night, and Hoyos was in the middle of one of his better performances, rated 7.6 through 77 minutes, when he went down attempting to prevent a goal, colliding awkwardly with the post and tearing the ligaments in his left knee.
For a goalkeeper in his mid-30s, the timing could have turned the injury into an ending.
Hoyos remembers something else.
"You never think something like that can happen to you," he said. "When it happened, I had this huge desire to play football. But that injury also made me realize how many people were there for me. And sometimes, as much as it hurts, those things are welcome, because it made me feel very loved."
In October and November of 2025, Newell's dressed him for three matchdays after he recovered, against Tigre, Huracán and Racing. He never got off the bench for any of them.
Then, in December 2025, the phone rang.
Atlanta, and Tata Martino
By the time Martino called, Hoyos already understood what it meant to be pulled back toward a club he loved.
He just had not expected to experience it again from another direction.
Martino is not simply a coach Hoyos respects. He is a Newell's idol, a legendary player at the club and later the manager who returned to lead it to trophies.
Hoyos and Martino had never worked together there.
Then Martino called him about a project and did not tell him where it was.
Hoyos did not need to know.
"He's an idol, that's just how it is," Hoyos said. "To have an idol from the club you support, that you played for, call you, someone you'd never had the chance to work with, what can I tell you? It's very gratifying."
There was validation inside the invitation.
"It makes me happy too," Hoyos said, "because it means I did things well enough for Tata to notice me."
The unnamed club turned out to be Atlanta United.
Hoyos arrived to succeed Brad Guzan, the goalkeeper who had defined the position for most of the club's history.
"I knew of him," Hoyos said. "I used to watch football. I knew what kind of goalkeeper he was."
The two have never had a long conversation about the transition, Hoyos said, but they have a cordial relationship when they cross paths.
"Honestly, it's a point of pride for me too," Hoyos said, "to be in the place where he spent nine seasons."
Atlanta also presented something Hoyos had never done before.
At 37, after an entire career in Argentina, he moved abroad for the first time.
That has meant becoming both a veteran and a newcomer at once.
Hoyos has become close with younger Argentine players Tomás Jacob and Elías Báez, but he does not frame the relationship as an older player handing wisdom downward.
"I try to give them my opinion and the experience I've built in football," he said, "and also adapt to the different nationalities here, because that's part of the game too, respecting the other person, their customs."
Then he added something that may say more about him than any speech about leadership could.
"I think you never really finish adapting."
Asked whether he sees a younger version of himself in Tomás or Elías, Hoyos laughed.
"I wish I'd had what's in their heads," he said. "Because I was worse."
Mostly, he bothers them about learning English.
"I bust their chops about it," Hoyos said. "They're young, and it would matter not just for their careers, but for their lives."
For someone who once came within weeks of beginning a career as a physical-education teacher, there is something fitting about that.
He has become a teacher anyway.
Just not in a classroom.
Todo Pasa, Todo Llega
Four years ago, after Argentina won the World Cup, Hoyos told his children they would be at the next one.
He did not know then that he would eventually be living in one of the host cities.
His children had experienced Argentina's championship celebrations in Buenos Aires. Now the next World Cup would arrive in the United States, with their father playing in Atlanta.
Hoyos does not pretend he can fully explain the path.
"I believe a lot in energy," he said. "Life, God, energy, I believe a lot in that. I've been positive throughout my life, and I think that's what brought me here."
He still does not remember exactly when he got the tattoo on his ribs.
It was sometime around 17 or 18, near the same period when he had to choose between a professional football contract and studying to become a physical-education teacher.
The phrase was already meaningful to him then.
Todo pasa, todo llega.
Everything passes. Everything arrives.
"For me, the good and bad moments pass," Hoyos said. "And if you're conscious, you prepare yourself mentally and you really want something, at some point that desire is fulfilled and everything arrives."
The phrase followed him through leaving home, the lower divisions, finally breaking through, Vélez, leaving Newell's and returning as its captain, the knee injury and a move abroad he never could have predicted.
Asked whether its meaning had changed over all those years, Hoyos did not hesitate.
"I keep it present all the time," he said.
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