Juan Pablo Vargas

Vargas's clearest mark on his country's football arrived at the 2022 World Cup, in the group match against Germany. Costa Rica lost 4-2, but Vargas scored the team's second goal and was singled out as one of the better performers on the pitch that night.

He came up through Alajuelense's academy and debuted for the first team in 2013, though the route into professional football was not simple: his early registration ran through Jacó Rays, a second-division club, in an arrangement meant to avoid formation-fee payments, and the resulting dispute over his rights was only settled in 2017, when the parties agreed Alajuelense would receive half of any future transfer fee abroad. He left the club in 2016 after a separate disagreement over contract terms.

At Herediano he was sent out on loan almost immediately, to Belén, before a move to Colombia's Deportes Tolima brought a serious setback: a partial tear of the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, along with a grade-two sprain of the collateral ligament, in July 2019. Surgery was not required, and he found his way back into the side within two months.

Millonarios turned him into a fixture at the back, with a Colombian Cup, a league title in the 2023 Apertura and a Superliga along the way. A move to Brazil's Santos collapsed in 2023 when he failed the medical, still recovering from injury, and he signed a new contract with Millonarios instead. Colombia's players' union later named him in the league's symbolic best eleven for 2023.

He joined Puebla in December 2025.