While they fared valiantly in this summer’s World Cup, Mexico are perhaps international soccer’s biggest underachievers.
Of the soccer-mad nations, they are arguably the biggest and best to have not won a World Cup, for example. In fact, they have only twice made it to the quarter-finals, and the last time was on home soil in 1986.
Domestically, they have all the ingredients to be a powerhouse. They have more registered male professional footballers than any other country, for example, with just shy of 10,000.
At grassroots level, 324,000 people are officially recorded as playing football in some capacity – but the true number, the one not captured in state-collected statistics, is said to be closer to 8 million.
Mexico’s hosting of the World Cup in tandem with the United States and Canada demonstrated both the fervour for soccer in the country and the fact that it has the requisite infrastructure to be a force in the sport.
Liga MX is the pinnacle of Mexican football. And in recent years, league officials have been looking for ways to commercially capitalise on the enormous popularity of sport in the country.
A $1.25bn investment deal from Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, collapsed two years ago, prompting the resignation of Liga MX president commissioner Juan Carlos Rodriguez, whose role is now occupied by Mikel Arriola.
The commercially-focused MLS, whose clubs Liga MX compete against in the annual Leagues Cup since 2019, has often been held up as the example to follow. By industry types, at least.
And Liga MX have now taken a big step in that direction.
Liga MX scraps promotion and relegation, opens door to new investors
Late last week, Liga MX announced that there would be no promotion or relegation between the top league and the second-tier Liga Expansion from 2026-27 onwards.
Historically, one team has been promoted and one relegated. But since Liga MX paused promotion and relegation during the pandemic, the league has frozen the one-up-one-down system.
That sparked a legal fallout which ended at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, who ultimately rejected an appeal made by six second-tier clubs about the legality of Liga MX’s decision.
As well as the decision to scrap promotion and relegation, teams who finish at the foot of the Liga MX table will no longer be fined, as they were under the previous system, with those proceeds redistributed to second-tier sides.
In essence, therefore, Liga MX have instituted an MLS-style franchise style league.
If they are able to weather any would-be legal appeals, that would surely usher in a new era of investment, especially from those with deep pockets north of the border.
Prospective owners in America are always prepared to pay far more when they have cost and revenue certainty. That is why the average MLS franchise valuation is nearly $700m, far higher than anything at present in Liga MX.
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