Juan Ignacio Ramírez Polero

What Ramírez did in Uruguay's youth football before he ever reached a first team is unusual on its own: at Liverpool Montevideo's academy, working through every age group, he finished as the club's all-time top scorer among youth sides with 130 goals. That volume announced itself again at the 2016 Copa Libertadores Sub-20, where he scored four times for Uruguay's youth side and once put a hat-trick past Bolívar on the way to a runners-up finish.

He debuted for Liverpool's first team on 21 February 2016, aged 19, amassing 166 appearances and 85 goals in official competition. The high point of that spell arrived in 2019, when he finished as top scorer in the Uruguayan championship with 24 goals.

A move to Europe followed in August 2021, when Saint-Étienne took him on loan. It did not work out: six matches without a goal, and the French club cut the loan short in January 2022. He returned to Uruguay that year, joining Nacional first on loan and then permanently. The switch paid off almost immediately — with Nacional he won three trophies in 2022 alone, the league championship, the Torneo Intermedio and the Torneo Clausura. He backed that up in 2023 by topping the scoring charts again, with 18 or 19 goals in 34 league matches.

That form took him abroad again, this time to Argentina.

At international level, he has not featured for Uruguay's senior side, though he made 19 appearances and scored twice for the country's youth and Olympic teams, including a run at the 2019 Pan American Games.