Like his old teammate Lionel Messi and Toronto FC’s injury-prone Italian Lorenzo Insigne, Josef Martínez is a Ferrari that is a little past its best and needs some TLC to run properly these days.

Thankfully, for both the Venezuelan and CF Montréal fans, he has a coach who understands that well.

“Really, we’ve had to go step by step with him, and even though he’s showing incredible things, because he’s different, he’s also a long way from his athletic potential,” Montréal head coach Laurent Courtois told CFM reporter Olivier Brett on BPM Sports 91.9 week. “The last thing we want is to put him at risk too quickly and have to take a step back.

“We’re consistent in our use of him. His body is getting used to it. We want to use these days and soon in training to be able to develop him a bit more and maybe afterwards, in matches, he’ll take a bit more of a beating. But it’s going to be necessary if we want to have the version of Josef we can have in relation to our style of play.”

Frankly, given he’s adjusting to life at a different club in a different country and climate all while building up his fitness after a spell injured between October and February resulted in a truncated preseason, Martínez’s impact in his early Montréal career has been superb.

Martínez currently ranks third in MLS in goal-creating actions per 90 minutes, ahead of Messi and virtually every other player in the league. In his last three games, he’s racked up a winning goal at FC Dallas, the assist for the game-winning goal at his former club in Miami and a superb backheeled assist in the club’s last game two weeks ago in Chicago.

And he’s done it all despite having come on at half-time in all three of those matches.

“I didn’t have a long preseason, which is why [Courtois and I] had a good conversation and decided to take it one step at a time,” Martínez told reporters on Tuesday. “The most important thing is for the team to win. We’ll see what happens. I came here to help the team, to help the guys. I like our mentality so far and I hope we don’t stray from it and that we keep winning games.”

He’s already proving that his signing was an astute one and that the suggestions from Toronto, born out of jealousy, and elsewhere in the league that the acquisition was a misfire were wide of the mark.

And whereas once Martínez was the main man not only for his former club Atlanta United but for the entire league, winning MLS Cup, the Golden Boot, and the league’s MVP award in 2018, he has become accustomed to life as a rotational player in a supporting cast over the last year.

His game time in his only season at Miami shrank considerably after the arrival of Messi and his Barcelona buddies last summer.

But he’s a proven winner with the kind of mentality you want on your team. He wants to shine individually but recognizes that it’s the team that comes first, always.

“[Super sub] is a more difficult role because every time you get on the pitch, the match has its rhythm, its speed,” Martínez acknowledged. “Every time I enter the match, it’s after 45 minutes, it’s hard. I still have to be ready. The most important thing is that the team succeeds.”

The core of CF Montréal’s arsenal of strikers including Josef Martínez, fellow South American offseason arrival Matías Cóccaro, Nigerian Sunusi Ibrahim, and Canadian talent Jules-Anthony Vilsaint have six goals and three assists between them already this season just four games into the club’s season. It’s a far cry from 2023, when the attacking group as a collective failed to score enough.

So far, Cóccaro gets the majority of the starts and the majority of the goals but this is a strong cast with no star leading man. Once, that role was Martínez’s. These days, it isn’t. It doesn’t need to be.

He’s a quality player who’s good at doing a lot with a little, and it’s serving Montréal well already.