There is not too much shame in being unable to remember your 30th birthday celebrations and Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernández might wish the same fate had befallen him when his international teammates helped him mark the milestone this month. Their night out in Mexico City became subject to the kind of salacious rumors that can ruin a World Cup buildup; Hernández strongly denied a tabloid claim that escorts were present at the event and that particular storm appears to have blown over – at least until any on-pitch mishaps surface around El Tri.

Something that will not go away quite as easily is the issue of Hernández’s form. The West Ham striker has deific status in his home country and it would take much more than a late night to change that. The problem is that, if a key individual should ideally play his way into form just in time for football’s biggest event, there has been little sign of that happening. It has been a damaging 12 months for Hernández, who said upon returning to the Premier League that he wanted to “show I can achieve the things I dream of”. Eight goals in 33 appearances for the Hammers, only 19 of them in starts, was a stark departure from his coruscating form at Bayern Leverkusen. And although there are plenty of mitigating factors there is an argument that his days as an irreplaceable totem may be coming to an end – as all good things eventually do.

“I don’t see people blaming Chicharito for the move to West Ham,” Sergio Tristan of Pancho Villa’s Army, the high-profile Mexico supporters’ group, tells the Guardian. “I see people blaming West Ham for not utilising him properly. Bringing David Moyes in after signing a player like Chicharito was a catastrophic mistake, one that Chicharito has no blame in.

“It was a lost opportunity for him. He could have done so much better somewhere else, where they would have appreciated him. Most of us hope he leaves West Ham and goes to Spain or back to Germany.”

Hernández could certainly consider himself unfortunate that two-thirds of his season lay in the hands of Moyes, who was no great fan of his work when the pair were together at Manchester United. In April, after Hernández came off the bench to score an equaliser at Chelsea, he spoke of his readiness to start more games, but the call was not heeded and the rest of his campaign fell flat. A total of 89 minutes in Mexico’s friendlies against Wales and Denmark – his 101st and 102nd caps – passed quietly and although it was little more than tick-box humility when he said “I can be the top scorer of the national team and maybe they will not give me a minute [in Russia]”, an early World Cup goal would hardly go amiss. The last two years have brought only four of his 49 international goals.

Yet, even when Hernández is eventually shifted from the team, it would take something unimaginable to lower his standing in Mexico. “He is the team’s number one icon,” Tristan says. “Nothing that happens from today on will diminish his status.” Tristan points out Hernández’s symbolic value to the estimated 36 million Mexican-Americans in particular: his success in thriving abroad. “He embodies everything we take pride in as Mexicans,” says Tristan. “He is quiet and hardworking; he may not be the most skilful but his work ethic is unmatched; Many of us came [to the US] with nothing than that work ethic and it is what hassled us to our own piece of the American dream. Seeing Chicharito put on that Manchester United jersey for the first time was like watching ourselves put on that jersey.”

Billboards and television commercials in Mexico continue to showcase the nation’s favorite son, as they have for many years now. “We learned he’s a PR icon and that’s what we’re doing with him now,” the Bayer Leverkusen CEO, Michael Schade, said in 2016, albeit stressing that Hernández’s goal-scoring came first. The Bundesliga club sold 12,000 replica shirts in Mexico in the month after releasing a new kit that July. Twelve months before that, 5,000 had flown off the shelves during a winter appearance at the Florida Cup in Orlando; the club’s Spanish-language Twitter following mushroomed and, for a time, Hernández’s inability to do any wrong back home provided the key to an untapped market.

Whether the same will hold true wherever he plays next season depends largely on what comes to pass over the next month. “Chucky Lozano is the next big star and will be the leader of this team going forward,” Tristan says of Hirving Lozano, the 22-year-old PSV winger whose temper seems the only obstacle to a big move, perhaps one broadly in Hernández’s footsteps, after the World Cup. Jesus ‘Tecacito’ Corona of Porto is also coming up on the tracks and a changing of the guard is inevitable.

“He will be the tireless sacrificial striker,” Tristan predicts of Hernández’s role in Russia, which he believes will involve creating space for the wide men around him. “I expect Mexico to reach the final. He will have one important game winner in the knockout stages. This will be the culmination of Chicharito as a player and he will enjoy every second of it.”

That birthday party, and the year of Premier League stagnation that preceded it, will seem entirely irrelevant should those events come to pass.