FOR MANY YEARS, Mexican football was a magical realm in which the United States existed as nothing more than an exotic, easy-to-beat nation.
Living next door to an empire has perfected the suspicions and desires of the Mexican people.
We know the American industrial products are superior, but we’ve conquered their appetites with our avocados. The relationship is asymmetrical: despite sharing the most frequently crossed border in the world, many of the crossings are illegal. According to popular belief, at the dawn of the twentieth century, dictator Porfirio Díaz uttered a phrase that explained his failure after more than thirty years in power: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.”
In 1847, not so long ago in the context of a national history, the United States invaded Mexico. It’s worth remembering that American power was built, in large part, upon the appropriation of 55% of our territory. California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas all changed hands. During the peace negotiations of 1848, Mexico earned the meager consolation that the toponyms in our expropriated regions would be respected. Language offered symbolic compensation: the geography was under new ownership, but at least its nomenclature had been preserved—at least until 2025, when Donald Trump returned to the presidency with a vengeance and the Gulf of Mexico became the “Gulf of America.”
In civics class, my generation learned that heroism meant showing dignity in the face of defeat: when our heroes fall, they make famous pronouncements. During the battle of Churubusco, General Pedro María de Anaya realized that defeat was the only option: Mexico had run out of bullets. He surrendered on August 20, 1847, issuing the following reminder to his captors: “If we had any ammunition, you wouldn’t be here.”
This situation also applies to football, where according to our popular saying “we play like never before but we lose like always.” Crowds continue to fill stadiums because our emotions don’t depend on results.
In Mexico, the philosopher Jorge Portilla long ago identified the cultural importance of coming together, whether for political, civic, religious, sporting, or festive reasons. Whatever the occasion, once the revelry begins, all pretext is erased and the multitudes give themselves over to what really interests them: the joy of being together. This explains the filling of our public squares on the 15th of September, Mexico’s Independence Day. The same happens during Mexico’s national team games. What’s important isn’t that El Tricolor wins, but that they give us occasion to revel in the stands. Strictly speaking, the crowd is there to celebrate itself. In emblematic fashion, the chant we use to encourage our own is sí se puede! (yes we can!), which offers empirical proof that, generally speaking, we cannot. But even when the team plays poorly, the spirit of the crowd remains high, as if motivated less by athletic output than by keeping enthusiasm alive.
Our performance against the United States offers an exception to our collective imagination. Before football became popular in the US, games against Mexico were scheduled in Chicago or Los Angeles. The stadiums would be filled with Mexican immigrants and our goals had the air of a reconquista. To avoid playing in a pro-Mexican environment, the US Soccer Federation began scheduling our games in Columbus, Ohio.
Beating the United States was the unwavering distinction of a squad from which we demanded no other achievements. Our supremacy in CONCACAF (the regional Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football) is what explains Mexico’s status as one of the five countries who have participated in the most World Cups alongside Brazil, Germany, Italy, and Argentina. We belong to an elite group of “frequent flyers” despite never having won a single title.
It would be unfair to call us masochists since we derive no pleasure from our injuries, but we resign ourselves easily because the true sport doesn’t take place on the pitch, but in the stands, where the crowd exerts itself more than the players. In the indispensable Crowds and Power, Canetti describes “the crowd as a ring” that becomes enthused by seeing itself in the opposing stands, a vivid mirror of its own passion. This principle defined our behavior with one caveat: we were capable of beating the most powerful country on earth.
THE HISTORIC RIVAL
In 2002, during the World Cup in Korea and Japan, I was living in Barcelona. I didn’t have access to any channels broadcasting the games and had to look for somewhere else to watch. One of my best friends in the City of Counts was Mihály Dés, the Hungarian writer who generously edited Lateral, that unique literary oasis that helped introduce to the world the likes of Roberto Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Mathias Énard.
Mihály and I went to a bar to watch a game that interested us little but that allowed us to celebrate the miracle of friendship: Russia vs. the United States. A shock came with the arrival of our first beer—I couldn’t believe that Mihály was cheering for the United States and he couldn’t believe that I was cheering for Russia. We each backed the enemy of our enemy. Surprisingly, the match made us talk more about politics than football.
In 1956, the year I was born, Mihály watched Soviet troops take over the streets of Budapest. The players in red didn’t just remind him of the invasion, but of the ideological hegemony that dominated his upbringing until he was finally able to travel to Cuba to learn Spanish.
As for me, I belonged to a generation that grew up idolizing los Niños Héroes, the six cadets at Mexico City’s Military Academy who became boy heroes when they died defending the country during the US invasion. The most dramatic of them was the one with whom I shared a name. According to legend, Juan Escutia was wounded on the rooftop of the Chapultepec Castle; to prevent the flag from falling into the hands of the invaders, he wrapped himself in it and threw himself into the abyss. Every September 13, we recited the poem Amado Nervo dedicated to the tragedy:
Like a blossom that grows
Until an icy breeze withers its flower
So fell the boy heroes
Before the bullets of the invader.
Then we gave a roll call for the heroes—“Agustín Melgar, Vicente Suárez, Juan de la Barrera, Fernando Montes de Oca, Francisco Márquez, Juan Escutia”—and the room cried out after each name: “He died for the homeland!”
The strange pedagogy I was subjected to suggested that any exemplary Mexican should throw himself into the void draped in the flag. This cult of heroism was so extreme that no child wanted to emulate it. The United States, for its part, offered something else: it was the country of movies, Disneyland, and toys that made noise.
In our house, we repudiated the US in other ways. My father’s greatest pride was that he was forbidden entry into the United States. “I’m in the Black Book,” he told me with the satisfaction of someone who’d received a prize. In this era before computers, US ports of entry had a thick, black bound volume with the names of everyone deemed inadmissible. My father entered those pages for unspecified reasons, which may have included the following: he participated in the 1948 founding of the Popular Socialist Party headed by the leftist Vicente Lombardo Toledano and attended a meeting of young socialists in Moscow; he supported the nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry as well as the Cuban Revolution; and he expressed condemnation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was, thus, a “red” of some pedigree. He once took a flight to Europe that was diverted to the US due to bad weather. The passengers were forced to spend the night, but my father didn’t have permission to enter. An FBI agent escorted him from the plane to the hotel and stood guard outside his door. My father celebrated making an imperial watchman lose a night of sleep as if it were a personal triumph.
As I mentioned, Mihály was six years old when Soviet tanks seized control of his homeland and halted the democratization of Hungary’s Communist Party. I was the same age when Kennedy visited Mexico to promise the return of El Chamizal, a disputed piece of unremarkable terrain between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. In Mexico we have a saying: “From what is lost, take what appears.” But in this case the return was insulting. The United States surrendered 437 acres of terrain along the border, which only served to remind us of the 915,000 square miles they had already taken. The restitution amounted to a tiny tip: 0.00007% of what was stolen.
In short, neither Mihály nor I could be indifferent to the symbolic meaning of the match between Russia and the United States. Furthermore, only these two countries could provoke reactions that had so little to do with the sport itself.
If nothing else, the anecdote reflects the conflicted relationship Mexicans have to US football. For decades, we had the consolation of “owning” this nation on the pitch that dominated us everywhere else. But by the end of the twentieth century, that all began to change.
THE “CACHIRULES” SCANDAL
In the United States of the 1980s, football was a game that thrilled the girls who would soon grow up to create the biggest superpower in the history of women’s football, winning four world championships between 1991 and 2019. It hadn’t yet captured the attention of the rest of the country, however, but the 1994 World Cup was about to be hosted there, and an overwhelming corporate machinery had been set in motion.
No one wins without someone else losing, and Mexico has been a sacrificial lamb for many US businesses. Of course, we’ve also contributed to our own downfall. As soon as our neighbor began to show interest in football, we found a way to get ourselves into trouble.
Let’s review the state of Mexico’s Liga MX, the most lucrative league on the continent. To begin, this is a marketplace where profits aren’t derived from great sporting achievements but from the transfer of players and the support of a fan base that sells out stadiums and consumes the products that sponsor their teams. The advertising market is so big that national team games are broadcast by two channels simultaneously, televised matches are interrupted with impunity by on-screen advertisements, and team jerseys are peppered with brand names. Even individual identity is up for grabs. The player Jesús Corona was born with a surname that happens to coincide with a well-known beer brand, but he had the misfortune of being signed by Monterrey, a team sponsored by a competitor. Players’ names usually appear on the back of their shirt—but in Corona’s case, this might have suggested he was promoting the wrong company. In order for him to play for Los Rayados, he was baptized as “Tecatito” (little Tecate), an allusion to the team’s beer sponsor.
Distinct from similar countries like Colombia, Argentina, or Chile, our footballers are not backed by a players’ union. With little security outside the stadium, they tend to play fearfully within it. What can we expect from athletes who don’t even have the rights to their own name and can be baptized like a product?
In 1998 Manuel Lapuente was in charge of the Mexican national team. After the World Cup in France, I asked what he saw as the primary characteristic of our players: “Obedience,” he answered without hesitation. It’s a quality that helps a coach get what he wants, but it’s important to remember that most games are decided by the unexpected. A true crack disobeys.
In Liga MX, we delegate the responsibility of innovation to foreigners, to the extent that sometimes our national coach realizes he lacks a left winger worthy of the starting lineup because everyone who has distinguished themselves in this position is from another country. Under current regulations, teams can have as many as nine foreign players, with seven on the field at a time.
Add to this our disastrous playoff tournament that culminates with a mini-league of knockout matches that make for good television but are harmful to long-term plans and to the development of new players. Despite all the world’s important leagues (from Serie A to the Premier League) adhering to a year-long calendar, ours follows a different model. The real competition occurs during the draft—the buying and selling of players that results in a massive net exchange of money. Since each transfer generates profits, players are encouraged to hop from one team to another, which only contributes to their instability. According to the Mexican sports daily Record, in 2024 the opening stage of the league’s split-season format produced more than 54 million dollars in transfers, a sum that would be repeated in the season’s closing phase. Such amounts may not be impressive by NFL or Premier League standards, but they represent massive sums for the Mexican economy.
Beyond this are mafia-style deals like the one that did away with relegation to the second division. The pandemic served as a pretext for this absurdity, which transformed the “promotion playoff” into a tournament where victory doesn’t lead to the top league. In truly competitive countries, the second and third divisions are training grounds that help prepare developing players. In Mexico they’re a dead end.
In short, the Mexican league is set up to be an economic success and a sporting failure. Given these conditions, it’s little surprise that an illicit act would change the history of football in our nation.
***
None of this would have happened without an exemplary witness. The journalist Antonio Moreno has served in a diverse array of press, radio, and television platforms, and he currently directs the International Football Hall of Fame in Pachuca, which pays tribute to the world’s biggest footballers. From a young age, he gathered information that became more relevant with time. Raised in the era before computers, he dedicated most of his childhood to drawing comics about footballers and became addicted to mysteries of paper. Today his clippings from newspapers and magazines make up an archive so vast that it’s distributed across three different homes. He modestly avoids the term “collector,” defining himself as a “hoarder” instead. Nevertheless, his capacity to select and preserve interesting material has defined one of the most steadfast careers in all of sports journalism.
Distinct from reporters who search for the mote in someone else’s eye, Moreno likes to extol virtues instead of lingering on defects. He avoids issuing baseless offense or critique, but believes in truth—which, sooner or later, was bound to turn him into a dissident. As Bob Dylan puts it, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
Moreno and I traveled together to Monterrey in April 2024 to attend the opening of the “Football as Pretext” exhibition at the city’s Palacio Municipal, and I took advantage of the flight to ask him to recount the story of the most significant breaking news he ever brought to the Mexican press. It all began in 1988, when he was gifted a yearbook that listed all the players registered with the Mexican Soccer Federation. Soon thereafter, he received a press bulletin with the names of the players being called up for the under-20 World Cup. His love for exactitude caused him to compare the information and discover that the boys’ ages didn’t match. If the yearbook was correct, several were over twenty years old, a fact he included in his column for the newspaper Ovaciones.
The news was picked up by Miguel Ángel Ramírez of La Jornada, who took it upon himself to review the birth certificates presented by the Federation when enlisting players into the under-20 tournament. Many of them had been falsified (with such clumsiness that four or five of the footballers had been given the same birthday).
The scandal popularized a colloquial term—people who lie about their age are cachirules. According to the 2022 edition of the Dictionary of Mexicanisms, the word means “to patch over,” “trap,” or “trick.” For decades, Mexican actor Enrique Alonso animated children’s theater with his portrayal of the character Cachirulo, a nickname that expressed his fondness for make-believe, including pretending to be younger.
As expected, and as feared, FIFA took action: Mexico was sanctioned and lost the chance to participate in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, ceding their place to Guatemala. The president of the Mexican federation, Rafael del Castillo, thought he could reverse the decision. Weeks prior, he had attended a family wedding with João Havelange, FIFA’s highest authority. Football’s most important decisions aren’t made on the pitch but in hotels, restaurants, and at parties where directors scheme and rub elbows together. Confident in their close relationship and aware of the bribes Havelange had taken from Adidas and other sponsors, del Castillo thought he could persuade this person with such a discretional sense for honesty. He traveled to Zurich only to receive another surprise: Mexico wasn’t just being excluded from the Seoul Olympics, but from the 1990 World Cup in Italy as well. Never before had punishment for an infraction in the youth division been inflicted on a senior squad. What could have possibly justified their unprecedented sentence?
In police thrillers, the guilty suspect tends to be the one who benefits most from the crime. The same was true in this case. If Mexico wasn’t going to Italy, their place would be taken by the United States.
Del Castillo arrived in Switzerland with promises and gifts, but Havelange had already received a more tempting offer. The next World Cup was being hosted in the United States, where interest in football was almost nonexistent—it was urgent, therefore, to “warm them up” with the US team’s presence in Italy: otherwise the 1994 tournament would be a disaster.
Mexico’s exclusion from the World Cup came with a few consolations. When I was sent to cover Italy ’90 by El Nacional, I was surprised to find that Mexican broadcaster Televisa had one of the largest delegations of all the media outlets. Then, as now, the TV consortium was the Federation’s main ally. Our country had lost out in sporting terms, but business was still booming for the corporate elite.
To underscore our pain, it’s worth remembering that Hugo Sánchez missed out on Italy’s World Cup at the pinnacle of his career. During the 1989–1990 season, he conquered the Golden Boot awarded to Europe’s top goal scorer, sharing it with Hristo Stoichkov. Each scored thirty-eight goals, with the difference being that Hugo played for Real Madrid in the far more competitive Spanish league while Stoichkov still played in Bulgaria (soon he would play for Johann Cruyff’s Barcelona).
The cachirules scandal prevented Hugo from fulfilling his destiny with Mexican football. He remained a figure of admiration without ever becoming a beloved idol. His greatest triumphs occurred far away and he achieved little with the national team. We had reason to praise him, but nothing to thank him for. Italy ’90 sealed the disenchantment between fans and a striker they could never fully embrace.
REASONABLE DOUBT AND INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE
Let’s move on to another character who, much like a spy, pretended to be a supporting actor but was often the protagonist. One of the main promoters of the US World Cup was Henry Kissinger. When Rafael del Castillo was placing all his chips on the table in Zurich, he was unaware that Dr. K was on the other side making moves of his own.
Passion for football, contracted during his childhood in Germany, was something that followed Kissinger throughout all his geopolitical endeavors. As the White House National Security Advisor in 1969, he discovered the Soviet presence in Cuba after a satellite transmitted an unusual image: suddenly the island had a football pitch. “Cubans play baseball,” the doctor declared. Foreign troops had arrived.
In 1974 the diplomat helped João Havelange lobby to replace Sir Stanley Rous as the head of FIFA, and shortly afterward he convinced Pelé and Beckenbauer to play for the New York Cosmos. From 1986 on, he collaborated with the US Soccer Federation to promote the World Cup, using his network of contacts to situate football within the “world order” he helped shape as Nixon’s Secretary of State and to which he would later devote a bestseller.
His influence on the pitch is difficult to pinpoint because he specialized in shadowy dealings and knew how to cover his tracks. Politics requires sites of secrecy—it’s not for nothing that Mexicans refer to the profession as “the gloom,” where intrigues take place “in darkness.”
I clearly remember something Pep Guardiola once told me. When Sandro Rosell became president of Barcelona in 2010, Guardiola was in charge of the team. The businessman rose to the top thanks to his executive work for sports brands; he’d been vice president during the tenure of the charismatic populist Joan Laporta, but aspired to take the helm himself. His arrival signaled a different type of management. Guardiola knew how to define not just Rosell, but the majority of those who pull football’s hidden strings: “They’re parking garage politicians,” he declared. Shady deals aren’t made on the field of play, nor in club offices or directors’ boxes, but in the underground garages where cars are parked and secrets are kept. Kissinger is the best international representative of this lineage. Distinct from Rosell, who resigned in the face of legal proceedings, the former US Secretary of State was never investigated, which perhaps doesn’t reveal his innocence so much as his cunning.
What evidence do we have of his meddling in international football? It’s difficult to distinguish his silhouette against the backdrop, but there are plenty of signs that he was tying up decisive threads in the plot.
In 1978, Argentina played an anxiety-ridden match against Peru. The Albiceleste needed to win by four goals in order to make it out of the group and into the knockout rounds of the World Cup they were hosting. Before the game, Argentina’s dictator Jorge Videla went into Peru’s dressing room, accompanied by Kissinger. It’s hard to believe this was just a courtesy, since no other visits of the sort were made during the tournament. The unusual 6–0 result over Peru raised eyebrows. The mystery was perfected by the answer Kissinger gave anytime he was asked about it—the Peruvian players remembered his visit, but he claimed to have “no recollection” of it.
Years later, Peruvian midfielder José Velásquez admitted that players had been pressured by the government and management. Rodulfo Manzo, who went on to play for Argentine club Vélez Sarsfield, remarked that all of the Peruvians took bribes except for Juan José Muñante, a right winger who played in Mexico with Atlético Español and Pumas. For his part, Juan Carlos Oblitas, another member of the Peruvian squad, later said: “I perfectly remember the presence of Videla with a group of important people, Kissinger among them . . . It really caught my attention and I think it was something psychological, to create pressure.” Historian Pablo Alabarces recounts the event in A Brief History of Football in Latin America:
In 1999 the journalist David Yallop published How They Stole the Game, in which he listed official donations made by the Argentine government to Peru: 35,000 tons of grain, the unfreezing of a $50 million dollar line of credit, and small bribes made to football officials processed through Navy-held accounts. He also included $20,000 dollars that were to be paid out to three players by way of “a senior member of the ruling junta,” but he offered no further details . . .
The best interpretation of the events comes from the 2003 documentary World Cup ’78: The Parallel History, based on a script by Argentine sports journalist Ezequiel Fernández Moores. The film was the first to confirm that the dictator Videla did in fact visit the Peruvian dressing room accompanied by none other than ex-US Secretary Henry Kissinger in order to speak about Latin American unity and wish the players luck. In the documentary, Juan Carlos Oblitas does not hesitate to call it an act of pressure, but denies any knowledge of bribes or other explicit transactions, despite having said something different in 1986. The pressure itself seemed sufficient to affect the Peruvian players: Videla is not known to have ever violated the privacy of the Argentine locker room before a match.
Kissinger recognized the geopolitical importance football would take on in his adopted nation before any other politician. Journalist Gustavo Veiga wrote in Argentine newspaper Página 12 about the two visits Kissinger made on the eve of the 1978 World Cup to meet vice admiral César Guzzetti, Argentina’s foreign minister—one in Santiago, where both offered strategic support for Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the second in Buenos Aires. The World Cup was an auspicious occasion to launder the image of a dictatorship that depended deeply on US support.
Kissinger’s influence in the case of Mexico was less notorious but perhaps more important to football’s commercial fate. When Mexico was disqualified from attending the 1990 World Cup, the US was able to reinforce their campaign to promote what had, until then, been a minor sport in the country. The success of the United States in the 1994 World Cup coincided with the end of Mexico’s regional dominance.
In the future, it’s possible some declassified document will reveal football’s dark maneuverings. The current storyline doesn’t contain any irrefutable certainties, but it does raise a few reasonable doubts.
THE AFTERLIFE OF AN ILLUSION
Meetings between the United States and Mexico began at Italy ’34 with a 4–2 triumph for the eleven players representing the Stars and Stripes. After this initial defeat, our country began its long regional supremacy and remained undefeated from 1937 to 1980, racking up twenty-one victories and three ties. Forty-six years and twenty-four games was enough to consider football a magical activity: we could lose, but not against the United States.
In the following years things leveled out between the two nations: as can happen against any country, we experienced victory and defeat, but the United States wasn’t just “any country.” The hegemony that underlined our self-esteem had disappeared.
Accustomed to disappointment, Mexico’s national players refused to accept this new norm. In 2002, during the World Cup in Korea and Japan, El Tri finished the group stage in first place and were favorites to beat the US in the next round, but the team coached by “El Vasco” Aguirre played with too much desire to win, as if ownership of Texas was being decided on the field, and ended up losing 2–0. Unable to contain his rage, our captain Rafa Márquez delivered a devious headbutt to Cobi Jones. The gesture encapsulated our impotence in the face of our archival.
One of the protagonists of the defeat was Landon Donovan. After scoring, he mocked his opponents and continued fanning the flames in subsequent statements.
On February 9, 2004, two years after the World Cup in Korea and Japan, Mexico and the United States faced each other again in the Estadio Jalisco. When the players took the field, Donovan received the loudest boos. A few hours before, during a warm-up, the American executioner had calmly stepped away to urinate at the edge of the field. After the match he excused himself, saying he’d been denied permission to return to the dressing room. The excuse was as difficult to believe as the one Hugo Sánchez gave after taunting Barcelona fans by grabbing his genitals: accused of obscenity, the Mexican striker appeared before a judge and, demonstrating how much he’d learned from his friend Cantinflas, master of nonsensical comedy, explained he was suffering from an acute itch in his crotch, describing the gesture as an “accidental parking of the member.” He then apologized like he should have.
It took fourteen years for Landon Donovan to ask forgiveness for urinating on the grass in the Estadio Jalisco: “I didn’t realize the extent of the rivalry early on,” he finally said, “and I regret that. I should have had more respect for the people and the players and the rivalry. As I got older, I realized that.” His conduct explained the heated animosity our bilateral relationship attained in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately for us, bad results only amplified resentment. During Germany ’06, Mexico ranked fifteenth in the world. The problem was that the United States ranked thirteenth.
In 2007, Hugo Sánchez made his debut as national team coach against the troublesome neighbors. Obsessed with victory, he included six forwards in the squad who missed goal after goal. Desperation prevailed over strategy—Mexico lost 2–0.
There are few jobs more unstable than Mexico’s national team coach. After a phase that raised justified hopes, “Chepo” de la Torre occupied the hot seat until he was dismissed during the qualifiers for Brazil ’14 ahead of a match against the United States. Luis Fernando Tena, the admirable coach who won gold in the 2012 London Olympics, took up the challenge. Unsurprisingly, we were handed another 2–0 defeat by a team who we even afforded the luxury of missing a penalty.
On March 24, 2024, sportswriter Kevin Baxter opened his football column with the hurtful words: “Remember when the Mexican national team was good?” He was referring to El Tri’s defeat by the already classic “dos a cero” scoreline. A few paragraphs later he clarified the question: “Remember when US–Mexico was a rivalry?” In the opinion of the columnist, we’ve arrived at a point of no return in which Mexico is simply incapable of defeating the United States.
The improvement of our neighbors runs parallel with our deterioration. In Qatar 2022, El Tri failed to get out of the group phase for the first time in forty-four years. To top it off, Liga MX is an absurd place where fourteen of the top nineteen goalscorers are foreign. The gradual submission to the United States has had a dramatic effect on the main bastion of Mexican football: its fans. The tribe that stoically resigns itself to their team’s many defeats can’t stand losing to The Empire. In March 2024, Mexico supporters threw beers at the players; during the 2021 qualifiers, newcomer Giovanni Reyna was struck in the head by a bottle; and the 2023 semifinal of the CONCACAF Nations League (which ended 3–0 in favor of the US) had to be suspended various times because the Mexicans jeered every clearance by the US goalkeeper with homophobic cries of “Puuuuuuto!”
Ever since it was announced that Mexico would share the hosting of the 2026 World Cup with the United States and Canada, it’s been clear there’s really only one host for the “North American” tournament. Of the 104 matches, Mexico and Canada were awarded only thirteen each. Given the quantity of teams, the distance between venues, and the change in climate and altitude, it’s unlikely this World Cup will promote quality sporting conditions.
A decade earlier, when the FBI investigated FIFA headquarters, a widely-held rumor was finally confirmed: Russia and Qatar had secured their hosting bids with bribes. As might be expected, this inquiry wasn’t a disinterested gesture; few were surprised when the United States was awarded the next World Cup, achieving its ends through legal pressure instead of illicit payment.
Despite Mexico organizing two of the best World Cups in history—the one in 1970 that consecrated Pelé, and the one in 1986 that did the same with Maradona—it’s now being made to play a supporting role. Few sports journalists have dared to speak out about this. I sent a WhatsApp message to one of the most prominent among them and received an immediate reply: “Mexico didn’t have the financial capacity to organize the World Cup on its own and a tournament in the United States would have been very unpopular, which is why they decided to make a shared bid to take advantage of the gringo infrastructure. But it ended up very unequal. The party is really being organized by the United States. Canada is bringing the potato salad and Mexico is bringing the drinks.” His words eloquently express what most of us have been thinking. The most interesting part wasn’t what he said, but what he asked me not to say: when I asked permission to reprint his statement here, he asked me to omit his name, fearing he might lose access to the competition.
World Cups are monopolized by television, and almost all the press passes are reserved for those who work for the screen. It’s no coincidence that the former commissioner of the Mexican Football Federation in charge of preparing for 2026 was Juan Carlos Rodríguez, who once presided over Univision. Owner of the Estadio Azteca, Univision’s parent company Televisa controls the Federation and its dealings with the media.
Although Rodríguez had little room for negotiation, he did have a few cards to play: Mexico may be hosting few games, but one will be the opening match, almost as important in economic terms as broadcasting the Super Bowl. Furthermore, Rodríguez planned a strategy so that if El Tri places first in their group, they’ll play matches at home and in the southwest of the US, where they also enjoy home field advantage.
If Aeschylus could content himself with a few slices of cake from Homer’s feast, Mexico should have no qualms about enjoying the leftovers of a footballing banquet. This doesn’t make us a host, however, but a waiter welcoming guests with a margarita.
Supporting a team that never wins is a phenomenon unique to the contemporary world. Our country’s recurring performances in the World Cup have ended in failure, but this hasn’t diminished our passion. At the beginning of my correspondence with Martín Caparrós for El País during South Africa 2010, Boca Juniors’ biographer asked himself how far his country could make it. Then he added another question: What justified supporting a team with no chance of transcendence? His curiosity struck a chord with me. El Tri not only lacked any realistic chance of victory, they ended up contributing to Argentina’s glory by offering their defeat.
The hopes of thousands of Mexicans who sold their car or their house to fly to Johannesburg needed no other reward aside from celebrating themselves in the African stadiums. Our happiness feeds on pretense, not reality.
That said, we must recognize that some goals hurt more than others. Beating the United States was our main outlet. It’s no coincidence that discontent and violence in the stands has been on the rise.
Each time our team loses, the current coach resorts to one of the vague platitudes we use to downplay the evidence: “The conditions weren’t right.” Responsibility is dismissed as fate, which sidesteps the main lesson of defeat—that another’s power is made possible through one’s own weakness.
Mexico may have no shortage of phrases used to evade judgment, but perhaps no proclamation better encapsulates our torturous and asymmetrical relationship with the United States than the one uttered by the defeated General Anaya: “If we had any ammunition, you wouldn’t be here.”
Translated from Spanish by Francisco Cantú
Excerpted from The Game at the End of the World(Restless Books, May 5, 2026)
Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.
