🏆 The World Cup will bring El Tri to Guadalajara since the FMF won't
El Tri heading to one of the biggest cities in the country shouldn't be news, but it is. PLUS: Thoughts on DFW's fate & the Conca-catch-up!
Most of the excitement from FIFA’s World Cup announcement Sunday came from the U.S., where we learned MetLife Stadium will host the final in 2026, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta have semifinals and Miami gets the third place game.
That makes sense, as the business end of the sport’s biggest showcase for men’s soccer will take place in the U.S., and there was considerable speculation (most of it totally wrong) from the international press about which city would end up hosting the marquee matches.
Yet, in Mexico there were some subtly significant announcements as well. Mexico City’s famed Estadio Azteca will host the opening match of the tournament, as long expected, and has five total games.
Chivas’ home, the Estadio Akron will host four matches. Not only that, the Akron will host the Mexico men’s national team. That’s something that shouldn’t be out of the norm, but is.
The last time Mexico’s men’s national team played a friendly in Guadalajara, a soccer-loving area with a metro population of more than 5 million people, was 2010 when El Tri fell to Ecuador at a brand-new Estadio Omnilife.
Since then, Mexico has played eight times in North Texas’ AT&T Stadium, seven times in the Rose Bowl in Southern California and nine times in State Farm Stadium outside Phoenix. Some of those games were tournament matches that Mexico didn’t control, but the point is that it’s far more likely fans in the Southwestern U.S. have seen their national team in the last decade than fans in Mexico’s third-largest metropolitan area.
Guadalajara gets frozen out. So, too, does fellow World Cup host city Monterrey. And border towns like Tijuana and Juarez.
Like so many things in Mexican soccer, we have only whispers that turn to reports that turn to accepted truth to understand why Mexico never chooses to go to Guadalajara (or those other places).