The Montreal club signed Josef Martinez to a one-year contract

CF Montreal's offensive rebuild continued on Tuesday with the addition of Venezuelan forward Josef Martinez.

The Premier League club have announced the signing of the prolific goalscorer on a one-year deal, including an option, using target money.

Martinez, 30, has 105 career goals, ninth most in league history, over 161 MLS games with Atlanta United and Inter Miami.

He was one of 13 players in MLS to score at least 100 goals and the fastest player to accomplish the feat in just 125 games.

His 90th-minute goal came in a 2-2 draw with Columbus in July

He was the MLS Most Valuable Player in 2018, when he scored 31 goals in 34 regular season games with Atlanta, including the MLS Cup winning goal.

While he was limited to seven goals in 27 MLS games last season with Miami, no Montreal player has scored more than six goals in all competitions in 2023.

He added three goals and two assists in seven games as Miami won its first League Cup and two goals in six U.S. Open Cup games.

At the international level, Martínez scored 14 goals in 66 matches for Venezuela.

Martinez joins Uruguayan forward Matias Coccaro and Bulgarian-Canadian attacking midfielder Dominik Iankov as offseason additions tasked with injecting life into a Montreal front office that was stagnant last season.

Montreal's 36 goals in MLS was fourth-fewest in the league as they missed the playoffs last season. The club has just six of an available 27 points from its last nine games and is 10th in the Eastern Conference, two points out of the playoffs, after a season-ending 2-1 loss at Columbus.

Montreal has been shut out or scored in eight of their last 10 games.

A season-ending collapse led to the resignation of head coach Hernan Losada after one season. Laurent Courtois, who led one of the premier offenses in the MLS Next Pro development league with Columbus Crew 2, was hired to replace Losada on January 8.

– This report from The Canadian Press was first published on February 6, 2024.