Julián Quiñones was born in Colombia in 1997 and left for Mexico as a teenager, joining the under-20 squad at Tigres UANL, where he was that division’s leading scorer in the Apertura 2015 season. He became a naturalised Mexican international on 11 October 2023.

His money is simple to describe and hard to pin down. Almost all of it is wages, from nearly a decade in Liga MX and two completed seasons in Saudi Arabia, and very little of it has been published, so most of what follows is reasoned from contract scale.

He made his professional debut on loan at Venados in 2016, in Mexico’s second tier, and moved to Lobos BUAP in 2017, finishing that Apertura as its third-highest scorer with nine goals. Those were low-paid years by the standards of what followed: a young forward on loan in the second tier and then at a newly promoted top-flight club would have been on something in the region of $150,000 to $300,000 a year.

The step up came at Atlas, where he arrived in 2019 and became a first-choice forward.

Atlas won back-to-back Liga MX championships in 2021 and 2022, ending a seventy-year wait, and Quiñones was central to both. That took him to Club América at the start of 2023 and out of Liga MX in 2024, when Al-Qadsiah signed him for the Saudi Pro League. Fox Sports México reported that América was ready to accept an offer of around $9 million and that the player stood to earn roughly three times his Mexican salary in Saudi Arabia. A transfer fee is the selling club’s money and forms no part of his own.

His wages do, and this is our estimate, built from contract scale at each stage. The four years around Tigres, Venados and Lobos BUAP averaged about $200,000 a season, so roughly $800,000. Four seasons at Atlas as a starter and champion averaged about $900,000 a season, so roughly $3.6 million. A season and a half at América, at the top of the Liga MX scale, was worth about $1.8 million a year, so roughly $2.7 million. The two completed Saudi seasons, at the threefold uplift reported when he signed, work out at about $5.5 million a season, so roughly $11 million.

That is roughly $18 million in gross career wages to the end of the 2025-26 season. The extension ESPN Deportes reported Al-Qadsiah announcing on 25 May 2026, running to 2029, is money he has not yet earned, and none of it is counted here or below.

Fox News puts his Liga MX record at 258 appearances and 94 goals, with nine domestic titles. In the 2025-26 Saudi Pro League season he scored 33 goals in 31 appearances and took the golden boot, ahead of Ivan Toney and Cristiano Ronaldo.

The 2026 World Cup took him well beyond Mexico. He scored the opening goal of the tournament in the ninth minute of the first match, on 11 June 2026, in a 2-0 win over South Africa at the Estadio Azteca — the 2,721st goal in World Cup history and the first tournament-opening goal by a CONCACAF player, beIN Sports recorded. He finished with four goals and an assist, equalling the record for the most by a Mexican at a single World Cup, shared with Luis Hernández and Javier Hernández, before Mexico went out to England in the round of 16.

He was named on the 2026 Ballon d’Or shortlist, the second Mexican nominated after the goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa in 2007. That award is due to be announced at the London Palladium on 26 October 2026.

The golden boot and the Ballon d’Or shortlisting moved him out of the category of a good Liga MX forward and into the group of players carrying commercial weight in two markets at once. the Saudi Pro League carried his line after another tournament goal, that he would keep fighting for Mexico.

A forward with a golden boot, a World Cup record and a Ballon d’Or shortlisting is a boot sponsor’s asset and a Mexican market asset at once, and that is the shape of his off-field income: a technical sponsorship covering boots and training wear, plus domestic endorsements in Mexico, where World Cup scorers are heavily used in advertising.

Our estimate for a player at that level is $300,000 to $800,000 a year from 2026, and much less before the tournament. Across the career to date we model the off-field stream at roughly $1.5 million gross.

At 29 and mid-career, his income sits in playing contracts rather than companies. The most valuable thing he controls is the renewed Al-Qadsiah agreement, and the image-rights element Saudi Pro League contracts customarily carry alongside basic wages, which is where a player of his profile earns above the salary line.

That renewal runs to 2029, so most of what it is worth to him is still ahead. It belongs in a forecast rather than a statement of what he owns today, and it is excluded from both the wage total and the figure.

Wealth at his stage is mostly cash, mostly recent, and held as deposits and property rather than equity. The Saudi years are why: salary earned in Saudi Arabia carries no personal income tax, so the last two seasons converted into retained capital at a rate the Mexican years could not.

We model property in Mexico and in the Gulf at a combined share of his after-tax earnings consistent with players on comparable contracts, and treat the balance as liquid.