Football in Mexico: ‘A Paradise for Foreigners’?

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Keith Brewster and Claire Brewster Newcastle University

Abstract: This article traces the development of Mexican football from its inception to the successful hosting of two World Cup finals. We place our analysis within a post-revolutionary context that exalted the virtues of self-discipline that sport could contribute towards the patriotic endeavour of “improving the race”. We argue that the character of the post-revolutionary state, in which a symbiotic relationship between public and private endeavours was encouraged, was reflected in the distinct way in which football developed in Mexico.

Furthermore, it also influenced the way in which sporting culture contributed to the Mexican migrant experience in the United States.

Key words: Mexico, football, nationalism, identity, media, Televisa 2

In the introduction to his book Mañana Forever, Jorge Castañeda reflects on ‘why Mexicans are lousy at

Soccer’. Comparing Mexico’s international record in association football to that of its more illustrious Latin

American neighbours he surmises that something in the Mexican character prevents players from firmly embracing a team ethos. Underlining that the sports in which Mexicans have enjoyed success are almost exclusively non-team events, he uses his somewhat light-hearted observations about Mexican sporting prowess as a starting point for a more serious analysis regarding the intrinsically individualistic nature of

Mexican national character (Castañeda, 2011: 3-8).

Closer scrutiny of Mexican football undermines Castaneda’s thesis. If success in football were only measured in terms of winning international tournaments, then Mexico would find themselves in good company: only eight nations, for example, have won the World Cup. What is remarkable about Mexican football is that despite its comparatively late adoption as a mass sport, it has for many years enjoyed a prominent position on the international scene. Mexico was the first nation to stage two World Cup finals; its national team regularly qualifies for the finals of international tournaments; and its record in them is every bit as good as more acclaimed football nations. Furthermore, for many years the international profile of

Mexican domestic football has been one of the strongest in the Americas. Hence in this article, the question we consider is not why Mexicans are lousy at football but what made Mexican football different.

Specifically, we focus on why Mexicans did not embrace football earlier, and what role the state and private sector played in promoting the game. We explore the extent to which such intervention shaped the distinct nature of football in Mexico and the way in which sporting culture contributed to the Mexican migrant experience within the United States.

The means of shedding light on these issues are not readily available. Historiographical treatment of

Mexican football is slight and tends to be highly narrative lacking verifiable sources (Ramírez, 2010; Meja

Barquera, 1993; Bañuelos Rentería, 1998). Part of the reason for this has been the reluctance until recently to see sporting culture as a genre for serious historical analysis in Mexico (see the special issue in Hispanic

American Historical Review, 1999 for an indication of the polemic surrounding the use of cultural history). 3

Another connected reason might be the lack of empirical evidence. The archives of the Mexican football establishment remain inaccessible while national archive collections contain surprisingly little. Evidence of football’s progression in Mexico does exist but only within an eclectic mix of scarce official publications, newspaper editorials, and secondary sources that focus, to a greater or lesser extent, on the development of the game in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. In some respects, then, our findings regarding the grassroots development of the game must remain tentative and are based as much upon what is not within the archives as what the few documents that are there actually say.

We do, however, offer more solid analysis regarding the rise of Mexican football onto the international arena during the 1930s-1960s. We argue that the distinctive nature of the post-revolutionary state, which began to emerge in the late 1920s, provided space for both public and private sectors to contribute towards the formation of a new national identity. In the case of Mexican football, limited government involvement allowed the economic elite to govern and market the game in such a way as to facilitate a rise to prominence that mirrored the country’s rapid economic growth in the post WWII period.

It was the entrepreneurial nature of football in Mexico that influenced its development within the country and allowed it to thrive beyond its borders.

Sport within a post-revolutionary context

In order to understand the development of Mexican football, it is useful to outline some post-revolutionary ideals and objectives. Importantly, the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) was not fundamentally about clashing political ideologies. Middle class concerns regarding limited political and economic opportunities unleashed a plethora of popular uprisings against the incumbent regime. As varied as they were numerous, these contributed towards a violent civil war that divided regions, communities, and families. While the

1920s heralded a period of tentative calm, deep factionalism remained within Mexico’s predominantly rural population. The political elite charged with the task of steering the country towards lasting stability deployed diverse measures to contain the considerable threat that this represented. Selective provision of agrarian and labour reform, co-option of union leaders, and erosion of the Catholic Church’s power all 4 contributed towards the construction of a corporate state during the 1930s. Led by the Partido Nacional

Revolucionario (predecessor of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional), the driving political rhetoric of this project was one in which the military, the urban and rural proletariat, and the business sector joined forces with the state in the patriotic endeavour of rebuilding the nation. The inclusion of the private sector was by no means an accident. While the Revolution may have dismantled the power of the landed elite, it had not been an ideological war against capitalism. Reflecting the background of many of the emerging political class, entrepreneurial skills were seen as vital for national redemption. What emerged was a project in which both public and private sectors deployed diverse initiatives to convince recalcitrant Mexicans that they all had a part to play in Mexico’s future.

Our understanding of the dynamics of Mexico’s post-revolutionary project has been considerably enriched by the work of cultural historians during the last twenty years. Pioneering work by Ilene O’Malley, consolidated by Mary Kay Vaughan and Thomas Benjamin, show how the state deployed cultural strategies to sustain the rhetoric of post-revolutionary unity and national redemption (O’Malley, 1986; Vaughan, 1997;

Benjamin, 2000). Reification of ‘La Revolución’ became a totem for nationalistic objectives. State sponsorship of monuments, commemorations, and public holidays were all designed to infuse a sense of gratitude towards those who had sacrificed all for the revolutionary cause, and loyalty towards a state that purported to safeguard the achievements of the Revolution.

Importantly, rural education set about instilling these values within the younger generation. History and geography lessons were designed to create a sense of nationhood, while missionaries reached out to

Mexico’s many indigenous communities simultaneously to celebrate and incorporate the country’s cultural diversity within a new shared national identity. The role of physical education and sport within such endeavours became increasingly recognised during the 1920s and 1930s. In common with other Latin

American countries, Mexican intellectuals and pedagogues linked the developed world’s advancements to the way in which physical education inculcated moral and physical qualities within the younger generation.

Gymnastics and basketball became intrinsic elements within the school curriculum and were integrated within the broader patriotic project of individual and communal development (Vaughan, 1997; Brewster, 5

2005; Brewster & Brewster, 2014). Yet developing an enthusiasm for football did not feature in these discussions. Whereas government bulletins actively disseminated instructions on how to teach children the rules of other sports, football remained largely absent from the curriculum and, consequently, from rural pastime activities. This lack of overt political involvement affected the way Mexican football evolved, the style of play that was adopted, and how the game was managed and marketed. It is to this that we now turn our attention.

The consolidation of football in Mexico

The early days of football in Mexico mirrored those of other Latin American countries. In common with the development of other modern sports, from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Revolution, foreign colonies and elite country clubs led the way in formalising competition between football teams in

Mexico City and beyond. The Mexican Amateur Football Association was founded in 1902 by an

Englishman, Percy C. Clifford, and early football activities took place in expatriate sporting clubs such as

Reforma Athletic Club and the Mexico Cricket Club. Others, such as Orizaba Athletic Club, the British

Football Club, Pachuca Athletic Club and, later, Luz y Fuerza were formed by British company owners for the benefit of their predominantly British workers. Initially dominated by English, German and French expats and then Spanish exile communities following the outbreak of the First World War, the early decades of football left little room for Mexican players to make their mark. Club Atlas, for example, was formed in

Guadalajara in 1916 by Mexicans who had studied at Ampleforth Benedictine College in England. During its formative years, however, Atlas was insufficiently established to compete in the amateur league, which continued to be monopolised by foreigners. Similarly, Mexican students in various private colleges in

Mexico City established Club América, which was accepted into the football league in 1917. Yet such initiatives alone were insufficient to form the basis of a viable sport played by local players. According to one newspaper, even people with sufficient interest to attend matches did not understand what they were watching due to their ignorance of the rules (Gedeón, 1918a: 1). 6

The approach to football and other sports during their formative years in Mexico reflected an admiration for “foreign ways” that preceded the Revolution. A Ministry of Education bulletin in April 1906, for example, reported on a paper given by a British delegate at a recent International Olympic congress in

Brussels. According to this delegate, the strength of the football team was achieved by its coordination and cooperation: ‘In England, each player in the team knows that he is not playing for himself, but […] for the society of which he is a member’. To corroborate this idea, the report quoted French social scientist Dr

Gustave Le Bon, who observed that when England played France at football, the English almost always won because they performed as a team rather than for individual glory (Boletín de Instrucción Pública, tomo V,

No. 9, 10 April 1906). Policy makers believed that Mexicans should aspire to such qualities if they were ever to achieve their full potential. Although the Revolution brought about subtle differences in the vocabulary of the rhetoric, this link between physical culture and a collective responsibility to ‘improve the race’ continued into the post-revolutionary period. Yet while embracing modern sports was clearly seen as a patriotic endeavour, the proponents were more concerned with how sports might change Mexicans rather than how Mexicans might change sports.

Part of the problem in developing a typically Mexican way of playing football was that those who assumed responsibility for popularising sports found it difficult to locate the game within existing elite concepts. From the very early days of the game in Mexico, football’s advocates tried to reconcile its physical nature with the enduring tendency to classify football, and indeed all other forms of physical exercise, as a branch of the Fine Arts. In defending the virtues of football in 1914, for example, the weekly cultural magazine, El Mundo, described the game as capable of achieving ‘the same level of expressive beauty as a ballet movement’. It substantiated this assertion with a series of photographs displaying footballers engaging in graceful exertion ([n.a.], 1914, ‘La belleza plástica del sport’). Conversely, an editorial in Excélsior pointed out the anomaly of condemning bullfighting when other sports such as boxing and football were considerably ‘more brutal, more barbaric, and more uncouth’ ([n.a.], 1918, ‘Los Impuestos y la moral’). 7

Firm evidence of the ways in which football was embraced by the urban masses is frustratingly thin.

Yet it is clear that there was significant grassroots interest in the sport. In 1923, Pablo Alexanderson created a minor football league in an attempt to formalise an already thriving degree of competition between local teams in Mexico City (Ramírez, 2010: 44-45). Significantly, he was able to attract commercial sponsorship from Spaulding, a US sports equipment company with presence in Mexico City since the 1880s (Beezley,

2004: 21, 43). The establishment of this league suggests more than a latent interest in the game among ordinary Mexicans. By 1927, the Spaulding League boasted a membership of around 200 teams from the llanos, an expression designed to distinguish the working class origins of teams who played on wasteland from the earlier generation who played at elite sports clubs (Fray Kempis, 1934, ‘El Aristocrático Tenis

Empezó en los Llanos’; Bañuelos Rentería, 1998: 43). It was from within this league that Atlante earned deep affection and admiration among Mexican fans. Established in 1920, this team of Mexican players from impoverished backgrounds rose to prominence and gained notable victories against Argentine and

Uruguayan teams in the 1930s (Mejía Barquera, 1993:23-24). While such a development demonstrated a growing interest in football within Mexico, it was late in coming. The popularity of football in other Latin

American cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Buenos Aires had become firmly established many years earlier (Goldblatt, 2006: 136-7).

In some parts of Latin America, football’s passage into mainstream consciousness was shaped by the nationalistic sentiments it could evoke. During the 1920s, for example, the Argentine press began to promote an alternative way of playing football. The previously lauded discipline of the “English style” was viewed as monotonous when compared to the skill and agility of recent immigrants from Italy and Spain.

Incorporating such qualities into a distinct Argentine way of playing the game facilitated the union of nationalistic sentiments and football. It mattered less that the ‘creolisation’ of Argentine football was planted and cultivated by the sons of Southern European migrants: the vital thing was that it was not English

(Archetti, 1999: 56-65; Duke and Crolley, 2001: 96). Pablo Alabarces and María Graciela Rodríguez concur with Archetti that the rising popularity of football among the urban working class allowed an alternative discourse of nationality to emerge. Through the pages of the sports magazine, El Gráfico, new sporting 8 heroes were created who meant more to the largely urban population than existing national symbols such as the rural gaucho. They go on to argue that the ‘official nationalism’ of the first Perón period (1945-55) used this link between the urban masses and football to produce a particular vision of national identity. By its overt sponsorship of sporting spectacles the regime found an effective genre through which to demonstrate populism and state interventionism (Alabarces and Rodríguez, 1999: 122-125). In the case of Peru, David

Wood argues that during the 1920s, President Leguía used football as part of an elite cultural project designed to bind notions of popularity, modernity, and nationhood. Images of football on cinema screens and the inclusion of the game within Independence Day celebrations reinforced an elite’s construct of an imagined community designed for public consumption (Wood, 2007: 128-129).

This did not happen in Mexico, or at least not in the way portrayed above. This may partly have been because the state did not need football to facilitate a symbolic rupture with the past: the Revolution was already doing this. The political elite’s reification of ‘La Revolución’ acted as the vessel through which the state’s nationalist objectives could reach the predominantly rural masses. Unlike basketball and gymnastics, football never became a standard bearer of regular exercise in school playgrounds within rural Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Communities occasional petitioned the national government for help to set up a football team, but these do not constitute a significant trend and they invariably failed (Portes Gil,

3/669/No.3; Portes Gil, 3/669 No.4; Portes Gil, 4/598).

While there was rising popularity in football within urban conurbations, there is little evidence to suggest that the post-revolutionary elite targeted it as an essential element in cultural politics. Roger

Magazine states that the Mexican-only policy of the Guadalajara team, Las Chivas, helped it to gain considerable state support during the post-revolutionary period (Magazine, 2007: 10-11). He does not, unfortunately, elaborate on exactly what type of support this represented. Certainly, archival records do not reveal any formalised structure of state patronage to Las Chivas nor any other team. Yet as in the case of

Peru, leading politicians were not averse to being seen to associate with the game. Photographs of national presidents and ministers making the inaugural kick-off at tournaments suggests that, during the 1920s and

1930s, politicians recognised the populist value of the game (Buñuelos Rentería, 1998, 64-65). Compared to 9 the state’s promotion of other physical activities such as basketball and gymnastics, however, the depth of direct political engagement with football remained shallow.

Part of this lack of government sponsorship in football may have been due to the fact that the sport did not serve as a useful tool for fostering nationalist objectives. It is clear that football provided Argentines with a popular weapon against perceived British economic imperialism, in the same way that baseball gave

Cubans a cultural weapon against Spanish colonialism (Carter, 2008; González Echevarría, 1999).

Football’s early development in Mexico, however, was not a focal point for rejecting perceived US and/or

British domination of economic sectors. Spanish appropriation of the game was not embraced as a preferred alternative. Rather, the widely-held impression that Spanish immigrants were denying Mexicans scarce job opportunities occasionally fanned anti-Spanish sentiments within the football arena (see Gedeón, 1918b and

[n.a.], 1919, ‘Al Margen de la Tragedia del Domingo’). In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, xenophobic aspects of nationalism were kept in check by the strong desire for modernity and progress, both of which could be found in examples from the developed world. During the 1920s, it was not seen as anachronistic to sustain a nationalist rhetoric in the classroom that glorified the pre-Columbian past while simultaneously imbuing children with US notions of how wholesome recreational activities contributed towards producing an efficient, patriotic workforce (Vaughan, 1997: 27-29; Brewster, 2005; Brewster &

Brewster, 2010: 20-21). Manufacturing a Mexican style of football as a sign of departure from the past never became an imperative in the construction of post-revolutionary nationalism.

The media and football administration

The absence of significant state intervention in football meant that governance of the sport was chaotic and conflictive. While the first Mexican Football Association only emerged in 1927, Uruguay and Argentina were already dominating Olympic football tournaments during the 1920s. It would take a campaign by the daily newspaper Excélsior, belatedly supported by private businesses and Mexican authorities, to enable

Mexico to send a football team to the 1928 Olympics (Ramírez, 2010: 41). Although Mexico officially joined FIFA in 1929, administration of the game was contested. During the early 1930s, there were two 10 football administrative bodies: the Federación Mexicana del Centro (FMC), allied to FIFA and responsible for developing the game at a national level; and the Liga Mayor (hereafter Liga) comprising the more established, wealthier teams who jealously guarded their autonomy (and their right to make money from the game).

Excélsior’s intervention in the 1928 Olympics was indicative of a broader trend in which newspapers and magazines used their editorials to pressure politicians and sporting bodies to raise their game. In 1925 a new publication, Toros y Deportes appeared. As its title suggests, it covered bullfights and increasingly popular spectator sports such as football, boxing, and baseball. Eduardo Castellanos, editor of Arte y

Deportes and Teatro y Deportes (which begun publication in 1918 and 1919 respectively) oversaw the translation of the rules of football into Spanish (Bañuelos Rentería, 1998: 61). This would be a major step in breaking down previous ignorance and perpetuating a rising interest in the game. Other sporting magazines would follow. La Afición appeared in 1930 and had a regular section on football with a dedicated columnist,

‘Don Facundo’. The paper also included commentary pieces by ‘Fray Kempis’ and ‘Fray Nano’ who were both vociferous campaigners for an improvement in Mexican sports administration. An example of their interjection came when it seemed unlikely that Mexico would send a football team to the 1935 Central

American and Caribbean Games in El Salvador (postponed from 1934 due to hurricane damage). When, with two months to go, the FMC claimed that the Mexican team was insufficiently prepared, Fray Nano used his column to underline Mexico’s moral obligation to attend. If the national football team was unprepared,

Nano continued, then Necaxa should represent the nation (Fray Nano, 1935: 3-4). Ten days later Fray

Kempis joined Nano’s crusade, urging players to train hard and go to ‘our sister republic’s Games’ (Fray

Kempis, 1935: 3-4). Mexico did, in the end, send a team to El Salvador. The Necaxa team, representing

Mexico, beat Costa Rica to win the gold medal giving Mexico its first football international title (Calderón

Cardoso, 1998: 8).

Government acknowledgment of the need to regulate sport in Mexico had been indicated by the establishment of the Confederación Deportiva Mexicana (CDM) in 1930. Shortly after its formation, the

CDM convened a national congress on football aimed at unifying different strands of the game. This, in 11 turn, would lead to the Federación Nacional de Fútbol Asociación (FNFA) in December 1936. Tensions within the FNFA undermined its effectiveness, however, and the Liga’s desire for autonomy led to years of wrangling and its eventual withdrawal from the organisation in 1943. This rupture led to the professionalisation of Mexican football, the importation of Latin American footballers into the Liga, and a rapid growth in the number of teams wanting to participate. Not until the formation of the Federación

Mexicana de Fútbol (FMF) in December 1948, was Mexico’s present football structure put in place, and amateur and professional sections of the game merged and reconciled (Calderón Cardoso, 1998: 60-63). The tensions within Mexican football administration, and the state’s limited success in resolving them, underlined the fact that the growing popularity of the game had converted it into a lucrative business. In particular, a symbiotic relationship developed between the media (that did much to promote the game) and the business sector which increasingly began to control and market the game in the professional era.

In the 1930s and 1940s radio became the main means of transmitting football matches. A World Cup qualifying match in Mexico City against Cuba in 1934 was a watershed in realising the commercial potential of football. The game witnessed Mexico’s first sell-out crowd with people queuing for up to four hours to secure tickets (Calderón Cardoso, 1998: 44). The prospect of such large public gatherings attracted the attention of advertisers, while the rising interest in football matches provided a ready-made listenership for any radio station able to transmit live broadcasts. The first of these came later in 1934, when Don Facundo brought news to Mexican homes of the national team’s World Cup defeats in Rome. Radio coverage would become so popular that in 1939 the Liga met to discuss strategies for getting fans back onto the terraces, blaming radio for poor attendances. Although broadcasters countered that radio was helping to make football more popular, the Liga insisted on limiting the number of transmissions. An agreement was reached in which only one radio company was allowed to cover each match, with the Liga retaining the right further to limit radio coverage if ticket sales were jeopardised. In 1940, the radio station XEB began a football service comprising regular fifteen-minute programmes providing news and comment about forthcoming matches. Eventually, the Liga’s relationship with radio companies was consolidated by merging interests.

With half of the Liga’s income coming from ticket sales and the other half from broadcasting rights, the line 12 between promoting and managing the game became increasingly hard to distinguish (Calderón Cardoso,

1998: 52-55).

Professionalism and a ‘paradise for foreigners’

The participation of foreign players in domestic Mexican football remained a dominant feature with the

Spanish Civil War stimulating a fresh influx of exiles into Mexico. Civil war friction in Spain was frequently played out on the terraces in Mexico, with violent confrontations between fans of España and

Asturias reflecting tensions between Spanish immigrants and refugees (Taylor, 1998: 235). While sports commentators would later reflect on the arrival of fresh Spanish talent as beneficial for Mexican football, at the time there were concerns regarding the numbers involved (Chao Ebergenyi, 1978). By 1945, Club

España’s team comprised nine Spaniards, one Argentine, and just one Mexican. In an attempt to redress the balance, President Avila Camacho decreed that in the season 1945-46, each club must include six Mexicans by birth. The figure was increased to seven the following year. This ruling was only valid in Mexico City, however, as state governors needed to sanction it before it became compulsory in their jurisdictions. As such, regional teams could flagrantly violate the law secure in the knowledge that they would receive backing from the Liga. The only team to maintain a staunchly Mexican-only policy was the Guadalajara team, Las Chivas. Ultimately, the Liga itself adopted the decree deeming it to be in Mexican football’s interests (and its own commercial interests) to have more Mexican players and that foreigners should only be considered in exceptional circumstances (Calderón Cardoso, 1998: 66-67).

Moves to restrict the degree of foreign influence on the domestic game reflected a conflict of interest that was periodically debated in the professional era. Defeat for the national team often provoked media debate regarding the detrimental effect that foreign players and management were having. During the early years of professionalism, it was foreign trainers, primarily from Hungary and England, who introduced new tactics and formations into the Mexican game (Calderón Cardoso, 1998: 60-63). According to Taylor, the wealth of the Liga often attracted Argentine and Brazilian players of average ability (Taylor, 1998: 235).

Mexican media attention focused on the way in which foreign players were stifling the opportunities for 13 home-grown talent to develop. In June 1965, a correspondent in Excélsior appreciated the benefits of foreign trainers and players in the domestic league, but lamented that this inhibited the chances of Mexican players developing their talents sufficiently to bring success on the international stage (Borquez, 1965). A decade later Revista de Revistas argued that Mexican football was the ‘sport of foreigners’ and that limits on the number of foreign players in domestic football were being flouted ([n.a.] 1975). A further article by

Fernando Marcos suggested that Mexican football was a ‘paradise for foreigners’, pointing out that over 100 foreigners, especially from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, were playing football in Mexico and demanding high salaries. Of the then twenty professional clubs in Mexico, fourteen were led by foreigners and only three or four of these had managed teams in their own countries. Marcos argued that the hybrid style of football that resulted from the foreign influx meant that few countries were keen to arrange friendly fixtures with the national team because they viewed the Mexicans as offering nothing new (Marcos, 1975: 67). A follow-up article in Revista de Revistas in December 1975 demonstrated the polarised nature of the debate.

Hugo Sánchez, at the time a youth player with the Pumas, voiced frustration that young Mexican amateur players were being overlooked in preference for overseas players of ‘limited talent’. Panchito Hernández, manager of América, countered by stressing that foreign players brought technical skills that Mexicans lacked (Márquez, 1975). In fact, concern over foreign players jeopardising national team performances appears to have been unfounded. During the 1960s and 1970s, the national team began to enjoy considerable success in the qualifying rounds of regional and global tournaments (Campomar, 2014: 261-

263).

The differing perspectives of Sánchez and Hernández are reflected in Magazine’s study of early twenty-first century Mexican fandom. There appears to be a consensus among Magazine’s informants that the ethos of the Pumas is one that gives local young talent an early opportunity to help perpetuate the team’s playing style of youthful exuberance. América’s reputation, conversely, rests upon buying the best players from within Mexico and abroad. The fact that América is owned and financed by the television conglomerate, Televisa, is crucial. To support América was seen by Magazine’s informants as aligning oneself with the economic and political elite. Televisa was identified as a staunch supporter of, and even 14 mouthpiece for, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional – the political party that governed Mexico from the

1930s to July 2000 (Magazine, 2007: 8-9). Pumas fans argued that the clientelism integral to the América structure was reflected in its passive, indifferent, and fearful play, whereas the Pumas, unburdened by links to the Mexican establishment, took pride in playing an attacking, inventive form of the game (Magazine,

2007: 50-51).

This link between economic, politics, and football style is, perhaps, the nearest that Mexico gets to developments within Argentine football. Yet the disdain with which Magazine’s informants regard

América’s association with Mexico’s then current neo-liberal agenda overlooks the fact that the majority of prominent domestic football teams had previously used financial muscle to seek success on the field; an endeavour that often led to the purchase of foreign players. Within this environment, América is only exceptional due to its comparative wealth and consequent ability to buy quality players. This wealth, however, emanates from a relationship between business and football that mirrors earlier patterns of development.

At the end of the 1950s, Emilio Azcárraga and Guillermo Cañedo had taken control of América and provided the economic stability and organisational structure that would help deliver the Liga championship for the first time in 1965-66. Emilio Azcárraga was the son of radio entrepreneur, Raul Azcárraga, who had developed strong links with various national presidents in the 1920s and 1930s (Mejía Barquera, 1989: 39-

51; Mejía Prieto, 1972: 50-55). Initially in radio, and later through television, the Azcárraga media empire

Telesistema Mexicana SA (later renamed Televisa) grew to become the world’s largest Spanish language broadcaster. By the 1960s the company controlled Mexican football broadcasting rights, it owned the

América team, as well as the newly-constructed Estadio Azteca, a prestigious stadium with a 100,000 spectator capacity (Taylor, 1998: 219-20; Sotelo, 1988: 70-71). (For greater analysis of the media’s role in the development of Mexican football, see Brewster and Brewster, 2014: 199-219.) Cañedo was a businessman and vice-president of the América football club. As president of the Mexican Football

Federation he worked to strengthen Mexico’s regional presence within FIFA through the Confederation of

North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). By placing Cañedo at the 15 head of Televisa’s football broadcasting, Azcárraga cemented a business relationship characterised by overlapping mutual interests. While in later decades the competing media channels, TV Azteca, Fox Sport and ESPN would all get a slice of the domestic market, Televisa was a commanding presence during the years of rapid development in Mexican football. The business acumen shown by Azcárraga and Cañedo exemplified a broader phenomenon within Mexican nationalism in which private and public sectors were attributed as contributing towards the “miracle years” of economic boom between the 1950s and 1980s. It also coincided with FIFA’s growing realisation of the sport’s commercial potential in an increasingly globalised market.

Mexican football in the United States

The substantial Spanish-speaking population in the United States, especially in California and Texas, had already stimulated the growth of Spanish language radio and television channels before Telesistema

Mexicana moved into the market in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, Azcárraga’s operation in the

United States (Spanish International Network) had become the most significant Spanish language television network in the country. By 1982, it had sixteen channels and claimed to reach 90 per-cent of the Latino audience within the United States (Hilmes, 2014: 403-04). Later renamed Univision, the media company played a major part in reflecting and shaping Mexican, and by extension Latin American, culture within the

United States. One of the most popular genres was the telenovela: Spanish-language soap operas guaranteed a loyal, avid, daily audience. Sports coverage, especially football, also enjoyed a vast following. Indeed,

David Goldblatt sees synergy between the two: ‘The huge increase in wages for the playing and managerial elite and their often flamboyant and erratic behaviour has combined with the aesthetic of Latin America’s

TV conglomerates to turn footballers and their private lives into an extended telenovela […]’ (Goldblatt,

2006: 776). The ties between América and the Azcárraga empire made the latter a perfect vessel for broadcasting the team’s domestic matches within the United States. In the complicated way in which broadcasting rights developed within Mexican football, different Liga teams became linked to one of several

Mexican television companies and, through a series of complex negotiations and arrangements, these 16 companies transmitted and continue to transmit the majority of professional football matches in Mexico to an international audience.

While Azcárraga’s promotion of Mexican football in the United States may have been motivated by profit, the impact of Mexican football on US television fed into a changing dynamic relating to sport and

Mexican integration into US society. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly under the Good Neighbor policies of the Roosevelt administration, tours by football teams from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin

America drew the attention of the US media. That Mexican teams such as Necaxa and América were travelling to the United States to play exhibition matches was an interesting role-reversal from the normal direction of traffic in modern sports. Rather than watching US teams provide lessons in baseball, American football or basketball to grateful Mexican hosts, witnessing Mexican football teams outclass the opposition in US stadia should have been demonstrable evidence of Mexicans’ ability to embrace modernity through sport. Yet as Jorge Iber et. al. point out, praise for the Mexican teams’ proficiency in such matches was tainted in the US media by underlying negative stereotypes. The Mexicans’ “firebrand” style of playing football may have beaten their opponents soundly, but it also bore testimony to the hot-blooded character of

Mexicans (and by extension Latin Americans) that Latinos were presumed to possess. Inherent racism reversed what should have been a positive image of Mexican sporting prowess and placed Mexicans on the defensive, almost to the point of having to justify their reinterpretation of a game made popular in England

(Iber et. al., 2011: 131-33).

The underlying stereotypes that such press coverage displayed would have been nothing new to many Mexican American communities. Yet recent Chicano studies on sports have moved beyond previous depictions that dwell on poverty, discrimination and segregation. When young Mexican Americans in San

Antonio enjoyed considerable success in basketball during the 1930s, it undoubtedly did bring a degree of community pride. Yet the players who delivered such victories viewed the sport as a means of demonstrating the capacity of Mexican Americans to possess personal qualities that would make them more marketable in the search for work. Success at the host country’s “own” game, therefore, allowed them to look forward with optimism when facing the undoubtedly harsh realities of life in the United States (Garcia, 17

2013). A similar scenario is portrayed in Juan Pescador’s analysis of the importance of football clubs and leagues organised by people of Mexican descent in Chicago and Detroit between 1967 and 2002. In this region, Mexican government agencies in the United States had sought to capitalise on the sponsorship of tournaments in order to publicise government programmes relating to immigrant communities. The recipient communities, however, resisted attempts to portray these as “Mexican” tournaments and preferred to use participation as a means of demonstrating ‘discipline, hard work, character, dedication, sacrifice and focused mentality: that is, all of the elements that will help them in their immigrant experience’ (Pescador,

2004: 369-370). The subtle difference between these two studies is that in the 1930s, an intrinsically US sport provided a vessel for underlining Mexican American qualities; in the 1960s, a non-US sport was doing the same. Pescador suggests that the increasing popularity of football in Mexican American communities reflected the rise of popularity within urban districts of Mexico from the 1940s onwards. It would certainly appear that in the Chicago/Detroit area, at least, football had gained sufficient common currency for it to be seen as a cultural expression of Mexican American identity. It is reasonable to assume that this increased role of football within Mexican American communities contributed towards making the broadcast of

Mexican domestic football in the United States a viable and lucrative business.

An extension of the commanding position that Mexican broadcasters have gained in the world of football is that the national team itself has become a valuable commodity. All regional or global qualifying competitions place Mexican teams against those from Central America, the Caribbean and North America.

Such is the demand to see the national team play, that some of Mexico’s home matches, especially friendlies, take place in US venues. Far from being a disadvantage, the Mexican national team often draws crowds that are so partisan that it sometimes upsets their US hosts (Pescador, 2004: 353). While exceptions occur, the generally weaker opposition to be found within the CONCACAF region means that the Mexican team has been able to establish itself among the strongest in the group with qualification to the finals of major tournaments more or less assured. Such domination offers Mexican fans a periodic sense of pride and superiority over neighbouring countries. 18

From a different perspective, Cañedo’s influence within CONCACAF and FIFA proved to be a major factor in Mexico’s hosting of the World Cup in 1970 and again in 1986 when the chosen hosts,

Colombia, pulled out. While we have written about this elsewhere, it is worth repeating the fact that both

World Cups in Mexico were fundamentally private enterprises (Brewster & Brewster, 2014: 199-219). As opposed to the 1968 Olympic Games, which was an initiative that came from the government, it was the business shrewdness of Azcárraga and Cañedo, and their close links with FIFA presidents, Stanley Rous and

Joáo Havalange, that delivered the 1970 and 1986 World Cups to Mexico. While the success of these two tournaments undoubtedly raised the profile of Mexico on the international sporting scene, they also brought considerable profits for Televisa (Goldblatt, 2006: 635-638).

What we see in the various ways in which Mexican business interests have propelled Mexico’s football profile onto the international stage is a form of soft diplomacy in which the state is practically absent. While underlying motives may have been more for profit than patriotism, the success in placing

Mexico firmly on the football map was able to make a strong contribution towards both.

Concluding thoughts

The distinct nature of football’s development in Mexico was largely determined by the composition of the post-revolutionary state. The corporate model erected and consolidated in the 1930s allowed the commercial sector to develop football (and other sports such as baseball and boxing) along business lines that were not viewed as contrary to revolutionary ideals. Entrepreneurial skills were encouraged as contributing to the broader sense of economic development that complemented the post WWII period. The comparatively late establishment of the professional game in Mexico did not make football a natural home for official nationalist rhetoric. Rather, early foreign domination of the domestic game extended to the professional era and deterred the establishment of a Mexican style of play. Whether this or, as Castañeda argues, some innate weakness in the Mexican character can explain the national team’s lack of success in early tournaments remains a topic of speculation. 19

There are, however, other ways of measuring international sporting success than winning trophies. The

English Premier League, for example, was for many years said to be the world’s “best” domestic football league. Yet the performances of English teams in recent European competitions have begun to challenge such an accolade. In the case of Mexico, a similar development can be observed: the Mexican Football

League enjoys the largest television audience in the Americas. Yet, despite regular appearances in finals, since their entry into the Copa Libertadores in 1998 no Mexican team has ever gained the ultimate prize.

This is not to suggest any lack of passion among Mexican fans for the fortunes of their local or national teams. Whether or not public displays of such fervour draw upon a deeply-embedded sense of nationalism is debateable. When, for example, Mexico beat Belgium in the opening match of the 1986 World Cup, raw emotions accompanied riotous celebrations in the streets of Mexico City. Announcing the result on

Televisa, Jacobo Zabludowsky stated that football had motivated greater displays of Mexican nationalism than those of Independence celebrations. José Luis Camacho, however, questioned the origins of such emotions and blamed Televisa for fuelling the situation. Claiming that the nation had been ‘damaged’ by such scenes, Camacho was highly critical of ‘football nationalism promoted by Televisa’ (Camacho, 1986).

A counterpoint to such criticism was the unbridled pride with which some press covered the tournament and

Mexico’s role as host. Typical of such articles, Pedro Baroja proclaimed:

The World Cup was a show of Mexico’s organizational capacity, of its society working together:

people and government, businesses and authorities, and the tremendously important role of all

citizens. The triumph of peace and tranquillity was the most important thing. [… Our] country

has gained so much international respect. Viva our beloved Mexico, with all its defects! (Baroja,

1986)

In a sense, these distinct perspectives serve as a microcosm for the interaction between football, business, and the post-revolutionary state. A symbiotic relationship between politicians and business (the media in particular) allowed for the development of the professional game in a way that, while not as overtly 20 political as elsewhere in Latin America, served a political objective of raising Mexico’s profile on the international stage through its business acumen and ability to organise sporting mega-events. Camacho’s critique suggests an awareness that nationalist fervour related to football was a construct of the political and economic elite. The fact that it was seen as imposed rather than organic underlines the tardy and half- hearted manner in which state agencies identified how popular engagement in the game could be used for nationalistic purposes. As a result, Mexican football may sometimes have been lousy; but it often also proved to be lucrative. Above all, however, its establishment, consolidation, and international success assumed a very different trajectory from that of many of its Latin American neighbours.

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