Hello everyone! So I'm doing this thread since people seemed interested in how corruption has affected our league (Wow, corruption in Latin America, who could tell?) and also I'll write up some stuff that is kind of weird, because I've heard that it only happens in here, and some scandals that has happened that overall has affected our league. Anyway I hope you guys enjoy it and feel free to ask about anything.
Now, I would like to talk about the current state of the league:
Liga MX is the top tier of the Mexican football league system. It has 18 teams and has this half a year championship format (we have 2 champions per year, instead of a year long tournament, Apertura from July to August, and Clausura from ). Each team plays 17 matches against the other teams of the league and the best 8 go to a playoffs tournament, called "Liguilla", in which the 1st place plays against the 8th place, 2nd against 7th, and so on two legged matches, the winners progress, obviously, to the semifinals, and then to finals, the winner of it is the champion of the tournament (so yeah, the 8th place could be a champion). Some people don't like it, most people I know do, because it gives up some really good matches, like one of last year's semifinal's match, in which cruz azul managed to lose even with 4-0 advantage (Pumas advanced to the finals because, even though they tied in goals, pumas had a better position -2nd against cruz azul 5th - in the long tournmanent). In the last tournament since league managers didn't get any money from stadiums entrance and the cheap bastards want to get more money in the next seasons the league managers decided to add another phase to the playoffs: now the best 12, out of 18, teams get to playoffs, the best four teams don't play for a week, while the rest of the teams play matches to get to the actual liguilla, so the 12th placed team had a chance to be the champion.
Currently there is no promotion and relegation and there won't be until 2026. The reasoning of this is that most teams in Ascenso MX don't have good enough stadiums to compete in LigaMX (only 6 have) and they supposedly have all of these years to improve their stadiums to make them fit the Liga MX standards, the winner of Ascenso MX (which has a similar format with Liga MX) gets some prize money to invest in their stadium. This of course caused turmoil among the Ascenso MX teams, since it's super unfair, and it has also caused teams in Liga MX to underperform since they really don't have any pressure if they play bad for several tournaments.
Now the corruption: As I said in the other thread, corruption has royally fucked the Liga MX and the National Team. There are certain practices that has affected negatively the league in many instances, be it youth development, players, fans of the clubs, the clubs themselves:
- Buying a team: Imagine if somebody were to buy Cruzeiro (just as an example) and decided he wants to move the team to another city in another state, and change the crest, the colors, pretty much everything of the last team... well, that has happened several times in the past in our league. It happens to small teams, the last one was Monarcas Morelia (even though they were a small team, they still had a lot of history in the league) and now they are Mazatlán FC.
- Buying your place in Liga MX: Somewhat related to the last one. When there was promotion and relegation, a team that was about to be relegated to Ascenso MX bought the team that won its promotion from Ascenso MX, so it remained in the top tier and the other team dissapeared. So it didn't matter if your team underperformed during the season, if your team had enough money, it would stay.
- Pacto de caballeros: one of the biggest cancers in Mexican Football, it's an unwritten rule that says that a player may not negociate with a new team of the league without the approval of the previous team, even if the contract between the player and the last team has ended. This obviously affects players since they cannot freely move to another team, or in the case that they go to a foreign country and the previous team didn't want him to, they sort of "ban" the player from playing for any team in the league.
- Underpaid players: A few years ago there was this team called Veracruz, that had such bad finances that they weren't able to pay the salaries to their players, Veracruz was dissafilliated to Liga MX, but some of the players haven't still got their payments. This doesn't happen that frequently, but what happened with Veracruz was quite noteworthy.
- Paying to debut: This is related to the youth development. Basically, if you really want to debut, you've gotta pay a big sum of money. So this leaves out a lot of people that could be good players, but just aren't able to pay the fee.
- Referees: Referees are crap in Liga MX, as an Americanista, people usually say that we buy the referees, but that's not always the case (there have been some controversies that even I recognize that we were helped by the referee), even with VAR (now people say that we or any other team buys the VAR) we've had some controversies in matches.
- TV chains: another cancer in Liga MX. You'll see that reporters and commentators will follow the agenda from the TV chain they work for. For instance: Televisa and TUDN (Marc Crosas, the guy of the tweet, works for them) are super biased about América, its players or the coach (Televisa owns América) and will talk down pretty much any other team, or at least the teams that are transmitted through another TV chains, like TV azteca or Fox Sports. The worst part is that it happens in the other chains too. There are just a handful of people that can give an unbiased opinion about what happens in the league.
- Money laundry: this is an example from a club, Cruz Azul: In the last year, it was found that some of the managers of the team were using it for money laundry and other criminal practices. The managers involved in the scandal, Billy Álvarez, Victor Garcés, and Federico Sanabria, are fugitives from justice and I think they are still missing up to this day. It wouldn't surprise me if other teams would have their scandals if somebody digged enough.
In the last thread, somebody asked me about a Netflix series called Club de Cuervos, more specifically about how accurate it was. It's a really good series, and it tells many truths about our soccer, you'll probably see some things that I've talked about in here, and some others that I missed. Overall, it's a nice funny series and it depicts well how our league works, so I recommend it a lot.
Narcotráfico and Crime related scandals: Sadly, our league hasn't been spared from the violence and turmoil caused by narcos in our country. There have been some incidents that have happened in the last 20 years:
- Gunshots near estadio Corona: this happened in Torreón, about 20 years ago or so, during a match between Santos and Monarcas, a gunfight happened in the nearby of the stadium. The players ran to the tunnels of the Stadium, some of the fans gathered in there ran towards the pitch or the tunnels. AFAIK, there were no deaths inside the stadium.
- Mapaches de Nueva Italia: There was a team in Segunda División (3rd tier of the mexican football system... I know it's weird), that were about to play a match against América Coapa, but suddenly cops of the Federal Police got inside the premises of América coapa to arrest the owner of the team, Wenceslao Álvarez, because he had some conections with narcos. The team was disaffiliated.
- El gato Ortiz: A goalie that played for Monterrey that had connections with Cartel del Golfo. The guy used to kidnap people. He's currently in jail.
- Alan Pulido's Kidnapping: Allegedly, Alan Pulido, in that time a player of Tigres, I think, was kidnapped, but somehow managed to break free from his kidnappers. There are some discrepancies in what he claims he happened. Supposedly, he was able to escape from his kidnappers and to call the police to tell them where he was, and it happened too fast. Nobody really knows for sure what really happened.
- Joao Maleck: this isn't related to narcos, but it shows how corrupt the legal system is and how if you've got enough money, you can get out of any trouble. Basically, the guy drove while being drunk and caused the death of a couple. He was sentenced to prison, but was able to get out of it by paying some fines. He recently got out of jail and supposedly has joined a team in an amateur league; it's such a shame because before all of this ordeal, he was one of the most promising young players in the country.
I think this is quite long now, so I guess I'll stop. You guys probably get the idea that our league is so bad, but not everything is bad. I've seen some improvement in the youth academies from some teams and there is a rule that forces teams to use players from under 18 categories for a certain amount of minutes so that they get experience. We also get good shitposts from all of the crazy stuff that happens in our league, and even if there are plenty of bad things, we still care about it and we have hope that some of our problems may get resolved in the future.
Thanks if you've read all of this.
Submitted January 05, 2021 at 06:07PM by spicyhuachimingo https://www.reddit.com/r/futebol/comments/krbhxk/corruption_and_weird_things_weve_got_in_ligamx/?utm_source=ifttt
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