Five goals in five games. No NYCFC player has ever done that. Nicolás Fernández Mercau has, and he's doing it as a makeshift striker playing out of his natural midfield position.
The 26-year-old Argentine, who arrived from Elche CF as a designated player last summer, has turned NYCFC's injury-forced experiment at centre-forward into one of the more compelling stories of the early MLS season. With Alonso Martínez sidelined, head coach Pascal Jansen slid Fernández Mercau into what he jokingly calls the "9 ½" role — and the results have been hard to argue with. A brace against Colorado. Third place in the Golden Boot race. A club record.
Playing a position he doesn't own — and owning it anyway
What makes this particularly interesting isn't just the numbers. It's that Fernández Mercau isn't pretending to be a natural nine. He's using his midfielder's instincts — movement, combination play, pressing — to function as one. That's a different thing entirely, and it's harder to defend against.
"It's obviously a new position that I'm playing, but I feel really comfortable in it," he said through a translator. "It's nothing that I'm doing different. It's still putting in the same hard work."
Jansen's read on him was sharp from the start. "This is something I sensed once I had the first conversation with him back in and he was still in Argentina," the NYCFC coach said. "So far, he hasn't disappointed anybody here at the club."
Sporting and Benfica are already at the window
Fernández Mercau's form has done exactly what big form in MLS eventually does — drawn eyes from elsewhere. During the international break, reports emerged linking him with Sporting CP and SL Benfica for a potential summer move.
Jansen said he wasn't aware of any concrete interest, but didn't exactly close the door either. "If you play well, you do well, that's part of our world in football. You will always get interest from anywhere in the world," he said. "When there's interest, there's interest. And once people report at the door, then we'll deal with it once it's there."
For anyone tracking NYCFC in the futures markets, that's a notable caveat. A team riding a player producing at this rate — and potentially losing him by summer — is a different proposition than one that gets him for the full season.
Fernández Mercau, for his part, kept it brief. "It's soccer and there's always a bunch of rumors. I need to focus on what I need to do."
That's the right answer. But the Portuguese clubs sniffing around him aren't going away just because he said it.
