There is a country with a hundred and thirty million people. There is a country that hosts a third of the World Cup in fifty-three days. There is a country with the most-watched soccer league in the Americas, more eyeballs per match than MLS, more passion in the bones of its fans than any goddamn marketing department in North America. And the owners just decided that no team will ever be relegated from the top flight again.
Not this year. Not next year. Ever. In late April, in a meeting room in Toluca that smelled of coffee and money, the Liga MX assembly of owners locked the door from the inside. Liga MX confirmed the elimination of promotion and relegation, a decision that redefines the country's competitive structure ahead of the 2026-2027 season. The measure was approved during an owners' assembly held in Toluca, where they agreed to adopt a system similar to that of Major League Soccer. This model is based on the purchase and sale of franchises as a means of expansion.
The franchise model. The MLS model. The model where a club is not a club. It is a parking lot with a logo. You buy in, you sit there forever, you cash the TV checks, and nobody can take it away from you. Welcome to the funeral of Mexican soccer's spinal cord. Champagne is on the owners.
What they killed, in case you were not paying attention In the rest of the soccer-playing world, the system is simple. You lose, you go down. You play badly enough for nine months in a row, and the league tells you to pack your shit and try the second division. Get good again, you come back. Get worse, you go further down. The whole pyramid moves. The whole sport breathes.
This is how the Premier League works. This is how La Liga works. Serie A. Bundesliga. The Argentine Primera. The Brazilian Serie A. The Eredivisie. The Portuguese Primeira. The Belgian Pro League. The Scottish Premiership. Even the Hungarian Nemzeti Bajnokság, for Christ's sake. The whole planet runs on the same algorithm. Compete or descend.
In Mexico, since 2019, that algorithm has been switched off. The owners said it was temporary. They said it was to "stabilize" the finances. They said it was for six years. What began as a "temporary" measure six years ago to "clean up" club finances has now become the death sentence for sporting competition.
Six years passed. The temporary became permanent. The "stabilization" became a velvet rope. And in April of this year, the owners gathered in Toluca and made it official. Forever.
Then, because they could, because no one was going to stop them, they killed the financial fines too. In a decision that accompanies the recent elimination of sporting promotion and relegation, the owners' assembly has determined to put an end to the economic fines that the three worst-performing teams in the points-per-game table had to pay. The bottom-three teams in the cociente table used to pay a fee that supposedly funded the second division. That fee is gone now. The worst clubs in the country have no sporting consequence, no financial consequence, no consequence of any kind. They have the franchise. They will keep the franchise. The end.
What this looks like at street level There is a kid in the city of León who is twelve years old. He plays soccer in the dirt lot behind his school. His team is Club León. He has dreamed since he could speak of pulling on the green shirt and playing in the Estadio Nou Camp in front of his grandfather.
There is a kid in the city of Tampico Madero who is also twelve. He plays for a youth team. His club, Tampico Madero, plays in the Liga de Expansión, the second division. There is no path for his club to ever play against the kid from León. Not by winning. Not by being good. Only by buying a franchise from somebody and moving it to Tampico.
This is not poetry. This is fact. In 2019, Lobos BUAP ceased to exist in Liga MX because Juárez bought the Puebla franchise outright and moved it. In 2019, Lobos BUAP stopped existing in Liga MX, because Bravos de Juárez had bought the Poblano franchise and with that they secured their stay in the first division. Mazatlán FC was born the same way, from the corpse of Monarcas Morelia, who packed up and moved across the country because somebody wrote a check. Monarcas had been in Morelia for sixty-six years. Their fans watched their team get put in a moving van.
The kid from Tampico, if he is lucky and his parents are rich, can buy a Liga MX franchise from another rich man and move it to Tampico. That is the path now. This is what is being sold as a soccer system in a country of a hundred and thirty million people.
The Liguilla, or: the playoff where everybody gets a trophy Now we come to the part that should make every grown-up reading this lose their mind. The Liga MX regular season is short. Seventeen matches. Out of eighteen teams, twelve qualify for the playoffs. Two-thirds of the league. Without sporting relegation and now without economic fines, the incentive to leave the bottom of the general table decreases to historic lows. The most ferocious criticism toward this new Liga MX is the possible drop in spectacle quality. Without sporting relegation and now without financial fines, the disincentive for a team to lose is now virtually zero.
Read that twice. Twelve teams out of eighteen go to the playoffs. You can finish the regular season twelfth and still win the championship. You can be the worst qualifying team, the one nobody respected, and lift the trophy. This has happened. This will happen again.
Combine that with no relegation. Combine no relegation with the fact that two-thirds of the league makes the playoffs. Now ask yourself: what is the point of the regular season? What does a Tuesday-night match in October mean? What does a club like Puebla, sitting in fifteenth place, actually have to play for? The answer is the answer the owners want. Nothing. They have to play for nothing. They show up, they get their TV check, they go home. The regular season in Mexico has been reduced to a long, slow, ceremonial run-up to a playoff bracket where almost everybody is invited and the trophy goes to whoever gets hot in May.
The Liguilla format, when it was invented in the seventies, was supposed to add drama. It became a refuge for mediocrity. A team can finish twelfth, get hot for three weeks, win the title, and be considered champions of Mexico for the next decade. Meanwhile in England, the team that finished twelfth in the regular season went home to play golf in May. This is not a deeper philosophical critique. This is the math.
The owners' defense, and why it does not survive contact with reality The owners will tell you, when cornered, that this is about financial stability. That the previous system was destroying clubs. That franchise values fluctuated too wildly. That a club worth two hundred and fifty million dollars one season could be worth five the next if it got relegated. That they are protecting their investments.
Fine. Let us take that argument at face value for sixty seconds. A Liga MX franchise is now, by the owners' own logic, an asset. Like a parking garage. Like a Wendy's. Like a self-storage facility. The owner does not have to compete. He has to maintain the property. The property generates revenue regardless of performance because the league has guaranteed that the property cannot be taken away. This is not soccer. This is real estate.
The problem is that soccer fans are not real-estate tenants. They are humans who pay for tickets and shirts and television subscriptions because they believe their team is in a fight. Take away the fight, take away the relegation, take away the cost of being bad, and you take away the reason for them to keep showing up. The owners are running a casino where the dealer cannot lose, and they are surprised when fewer people come to play.
The 2026 World Cup is in fifty-three days. Mexico will host eleven matches. The world will fly in. The cameras will roll. And the host country will be running a domestic league where the bottom team has nothing to play for, the top team has half the season off, and the trophy will be handed out at the end of a playoff that two-thirds of the league qualifies for. So far from the Premier League. So close to a North American shopping mall food court.
The English comparison, which should burn Let us take a moment for cruel arithmetic. This year in the Premier League, three teams will be relegated and three teams will be promoted. Six clubs will change tier on the basis of their performance. Players will be cheered or booed for the rest of their careers based on whether they kept a club up or sent one down.
In the Championship below, the play-off final at Wembley is annually called "the most expensive single match in world football" because the winner gets promoted to the Premier League and earns approximately two hundred million pounds in television revenue over the following three seasons. Two hundred million pounds. One match. One match decides it. In Mexico, that match does not exist. It cannot exist. The structure has been engineered to prevent it.
In Argentina, where the economy has been an active dumpster fire since the Falklands War, the league still has relegation. Boca Juniors flirted with going down in 2008 and the country went into a national depression. River Plate did go down in 2011, and the country actually went into a national depression. Argentine soccer survived all of it. It survived because the threat was real, because the danger was real, because the consequence was real. In Mexico, the consequence has been engineered away. The danger has been engineered away. And with the danger went the meaning.
Who benefits, and let us name them Let us not be vague. The beneficiaries of this system are a small group of men who own multiple franchises and television channels and beer companies. Grupo Pachuca owns Pachuca and León. They also own a club in Spain. <br> Grupo Caliente owns Xolos, Atlas, and Querétaro. <br> Grupo Salinas owns Mazatlán and a national TV network. <br> Grupo Televisa is involved in América, an asset that produces revenue regardless of what happens on the field.
These are not soccer men. These are men who own television channels and need content that can be sold to advertisers fifty-two weeks a year. They need the matches. They do not need the matches to mean anything. They need the matches to exist.
The 2026 reform is the structural confirmation of who runs Mexican soccer. It is no longer the clubs. It is no longer the fans. It is four or five conglomerates that own the venues, the broadcast rights, the franchises, and now, formally, the rules.
The Premier League is also dominated by oligarchs. American hedge funds. Gulf sovereign-wealth funds. Russian and Saudi billionaires. But the Premier League still has relegation. The oligarchs in England have to win. The oligarchs in Mexico just have to keep cashing the check. That is the difference. That is everything.
What this does to the kid in León Back to the kid. Twelve years old, green shirt, dreaming. He will grow up in a country where his team plays in a league that the rest of the world treats like a curiosity. The Mexican national team will continue to underperform at every World Cup because the league that produces its players has decided that competition is bad for business. The talented young Mexican player will continue to leave for Europe at seventeen, or for MLS at twenty-three, because there is nothing left to fight for at home.
He will watch his Club León play against the same eighteen opponents every year. He will watch Puebla lose every Sunday and stay in the league anyway. He will watch a playoff system that lets in two-thirds of the teams. He will watch a trophy ceremony in May where a twelfth-place team holds up a cup. And he will, slowly, start to understand that the thing he loved was never really competition. It was theater, badly written, performed by men in shorts.
The Premier League costs ten dollars a month on Telcel. He will subscribe. He will subscribe before he turns sixteen. Because that is where the soccer still has consequences. This is what the owners in Toluca decided last month. They decided to lose this kid. They decided that his subscription revenue and his shirt purchases and his stadium tickets, twenty years from now, were less important than the franchise valuations of the men who sat in the room.
They were probably right, from a balance-sheet point of view. They will be very wrong, from every other point of view that has ever mattered to anyone who loved this sport.
I am pouring another. To Lobos BUAP, who got bought and erased. To Monarcas Morelia, who got bought and erased. To Puebla, who do not need to win another match for the rest of recorded history. To the kid in León, who is going to discover the Premier League before he learns how to drive. To every fan in every Mexican city who turned up on a cold Tuesday in 2003 to watch their team fight to stay alive, when fighting to stay alive was still allowed.
Forty-eight days to the World Cup. The owners are ready. The fans are not. Cheers.
