Ezequiel Ponce Martínez

Ezequiel Ponce was sixteen when he made his senior debut for Newell's Old Boys, becoming the club's youngest player to do so. The move announced him early, and Roma paid roughly €4.2–5 million to bring the Rosario-born forward to Italy in 2015. He never established himself in the capital, and Roma sent him out on a string of loans instead: Granada, then Lille, then AEK Athens. The Greek spell was the one that worked. Ponce scored 16 league goals for AEK in 2018–19, the club's best return from a single season since 2008–09, and it set up his next move.

Spartak Moscow paid around €9 million for him in 2019, and he spent three seasons in Russia before a loan to Elche in January 2022 turned permanent that June, for a fee under €4 million. Ponce went back to AEK Athens in 2023 for about €3.5 million, and this second spell brought the trophies the first one hadn't: the Greek Super League and the Greek Cup in 2022–23.

In June 2024, Houston Dynamo signed him for a club-record fee of around €9 million, making him the most expensive addition in the franchise's history. Internationally, Ponce has represented Argentina at the 2017 U-20 World Cup and with the under-23 Olympic side, without yet adding a senior cap.