The rise of El Tri-Levisa and the war for Mexico’s football federation

This story originally appeared on Voxxi.

As the Mexican national team took out its World Cup qualifying frustrations on low-ranked New Zealand last week, Sports Illustrated journalist Grant Wahl took to Twitter to describe the months-long drama as “the best telenovela ever.” He may be more correct than he realizes if sports journalist Miguel Pazcabrales is right.

Pazcabrales has outlined in his column Los Demonios Del Deporte what he believes is the return of Televisa’s hand in controlling the Federacion Mexicana de Futbol Asociacion (FMF).

Much like the return of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) to power, the conglomerate is the ousted hand of power that has returned to rock the cradle.

“I no longer believe that it’s a coincidence,” exclaims Pazcabrales, “that every time the World Cup draws near, Mexico is always at risk of not qualifying.”

He cites as evidence El Tri’s rescue at the hands of Javier Aguirre from the failures of Sven Gorak-Eriksson and Enrique Meza and the intervention of Manuel Lapuente in the run-up to the World Cup ‘98.

The current managerial crisis that has seen four managers take over El Tri in a little over a month is an exaggerated, almost cartoon-like version of Televisa’s past attempts at creating drama on a national scale with football as its main protagonist.

Through shrewd, opportunistic maneuvers, the largest multimedia company in Mexico (and second largest in Latin America) has worked behind the scenes to “rescue” the federation and the national team on various occasions, purposefully creating a real-life soap opera surrounding the country’s pastime in order to advance their profits by controlling broadcasting rights and bombarding Tri fans with merchandise, advertisements, and more.

The current version of this manufactured crisis begins in 2011 with the appointment of Jose Manuel de la Torre.

Two successful years as coach came to an end in 2013 after a dismal record in the CONCACAF qualifiers and the Confederations Cup.

Luis Fernando Tena took over for one game and Victor Manuel Vucetich lasted two games before being forced out by the FMF (the circumstances of which are incredibly suspicious) in favor of current coach Miguel Herrera.

Herrera, his coaching staff, and his squad of Club America players were loaned to the FMF by its owners to secure Mexico’s place in the World Cup. Unfortunately, this telenovela has more groan-inducing twists than every film by M. Night Shyamalan combined.

Plot twist #1: Televisa owns Club America.

Plot twist #2: FMF president Justino Compean is a former employee of Televisa with stints as head of Club Necaxa and, the cradle of Mexico’s soccer universe, the Estadio Azteca. He was promoted to the biggest seat in the FMF thanks to the collusion of Televisa and its competitor TV Azteca in a bid to protect their mutual interests in football revenue.

Plot twist #3: Billionaire Carlos Slim, owner of TelMex and America Movil, has made numerous maneuvers into Televisa’s territory. He recently purchased Estudiantes Tecos as well as shares in C.F. Pachuca and Club Leon. This gives him extra clout in the FMF (league owners have a vote/say in the FMF’s operations) and the broadcast rights for their games, drawing the ire of Televisa and TV Azteca who were the league’s broadcasting duopoly for many years.

Plot twist #4: Jorge Vergara is the owner of Chivas de Guadalajara, Club America’s fiercest rival. It was long-rumored that Slim was interested in purchasing Chivas plus a few of his other properties. Vergara’s revolving door record with his club’s coaches mirrors the current situation with the FMF.

Plot twist #5: De La Torre coached Chivas (2005 – 2007) before his stint with El Tri.

Plot twist #6: Vergara was Herrera’s most vocal supporter as Vucetich’s replacement.

Mexico’s greatest footballer Hugo Sanchez said it best in a recent column for El Universal where he spoke out against the owners and higher-ups of the FMF for treating his beloved sport as nothing more than a toy for them to make money off of.

“The saddest part of this story…is that people are oblivious,” he said, “and they continue being manipulated and conditioned into believing that the players and the coaches are to blame for this crisis we have befallen. They are absolutely mistaken.”

Unfortunately for Sanchez and Tri fans everywhere, only Televisa knows how this telenovela will end.

The Soccer Reform Trilogy

Soccer in the USA is a little different compared to other countries for a variety of reasons including its closed-league system. Major League Soccer operates in the same manner as the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League with only bankruptcy forcing teams out of the league while the rest of the world (sans Australia) follows a multi-league system that promotes and relegates teams between divisions depending on their performance.

Enter Ted Westervelt, founder and head honcho of Soccer Reform. Westervelt has been fighting the good fight for years to bring promotion/relegation to MLS. He’s not alone in this fight and, as much as MLS and the US Soccer Federation try to drown Westervelt and like-minded individuals out, his voice continues to be heard across the nation.

I had the opportunity to interview Westervelt a few months ago. Our hour-plus long conversation covered numerous enlightening topics into the history of US soccer (all 100 years of it!) and the forces at work in the US soccer federation and in the business interests who have deep hands in the sport that are preventing MLS from switching to an open-league system similar to that found in countries around the world.

“Soccer was a global market before there were a whole lot of global markets,” said Westervelt, “but here we are still pretending that it’s not a global market.”

The interview was published in Voxxi in three parts:

Centennial: Filling The Gaps In U.S. Soccer History

Soccer Reform: Building A Better Soccer League In The U.S.

Soccer Reform: Barriers To Promotion & Relegation In U.S. Soccer

Mexico vs. Panama Gold Cup Match at The Rose Bowl

This past Sunday was the much anticipated first set of CONCACAF Gold Cup matches between Mexico and Panama. Canada vs. Martinique was played before in a double-header but I skipped it in order to partake in all the free food at the tailgate parties.

I covered the game for Remezcla where you can see photos (including the above) and read a bit about the madness. See more HERE.

I also uploaded a bunch more photos on Flickr that were unused. Here are a few of my favorites that were cut:

The foul that lead to…

…Panama’s first goal.

There are more on my flickr.

Keeping Up With The Frodashian

The past few weeks have been pretty busy for me. I have a number of things I’m working on as well as a number of things that were recently published in LA Weekly and in Remezcla. Check ’em out below!

Subsuelo Celebrates One Year of Global Bass Boogie

“With Subsuelo, we wanted to do something different than just a regular dance club,” he says. “We wanted to incorporate elements of live performance, of theatricality that was a little bit different than just playing at a big club. We also really wanted to keep the feeling of a house party, which is how I ended up in Boyle Heights in the first place.”

Don’t Call Them Hooligans: Meet Ultras, L.A.’s Major League Soccer Superfans

L.A. is currently the only city in the country hosting two MLS teams — the L.A. Galaxy and Chivas USA, who share the Home Depot Center stadium in Carson and play each other this Saturday. The former was established in 1995 and is one of the league’s first teams, while the latter was founded in 2004 and is the sister team to Mexico’s Club Deportivo Guadalajara, aka Chivas de Guadalajara.

Each team recognizes three groups per team as official supporters: the Galaxians, Angel City Brigade and the L.A. Riot Squad on the Galaxy side; and Legion 1908, Union Ultras and Black Army 1850 for Chivas USA.

Sick Jacken and Cynic Talk Terror Tapes Vol. 2

Jacken, your brother Big Duke’s still playing a huge part in Psycho Realm despite being paralyzed from the neck down.

J: He does a lot of stuff behind the scenes. He helps out with the merchandising and still helps out with the concepts. He actually got into production now. He produced a track called “Metal Rain” on Stray Bullets. He’s working on two or three records that he’s producing entirely.

When you’re paralyzed, that’s a condition that’s rare for anybody to come back from. For now, he’s using technology to get around it. That guy’s Superman. I’m glad that technology is where it’s at and it helps him let out his creativity. He’s working on beats, running websites, and designing merchandise. I tell him he does more work now than he used to do when he was walking.

Q&A: Chicha Libre’s Olivier Conan, A Musical Cannibal

You were quoted in another interview two years ago as saying that chicha music leads to “late-night drunken violence and suicide attempts.”

I don’t think I said that! [laughs] Say that again [quote is re-read]. Oh, OK, they probably paraphrased something I said but it’s kind of true. A chicha concert in Lima is not necessarily a happy thing. The ritual is that you bring a case of beer [and] put it on the floor. It’s kind of a family thing at the beginning. You’ve got the kids, you’ve got the wife, and you’re all around the crate of beer…and you drink and you drink and you drink! There’s a lot of drinking going on. By the end of the night, it gets a little bit of hardcore. Sometimes there are fights like on Saturday nights in tougher neighborhoods all around the world; people work all week and they’re a little harder edged. Chicha is ghetto music originally. The cliché in Peru is that the really hardcore chichador slits his wrist at the end of the night. I don’t know how often that happens. It’s one of those mythic things.

Q&A: Outernational, Ready for the Revolution

How does that tie in with the album, Todos Somos Ilegales? Why or how are we all illegal?

That’s the heart of the album. It’s a concept record about the border, but that’s just the focal point of these contradictions. The border signifies so much. It signifies the economic situation where businesses can move freely across the border and suck the blood and life out of people, but people can’t. People gotta be policed and hunted down and shot down by KKK-style vigilantes and it focuses on so much of that. Undocumented people in this country are kept in the shadows and kept in fear. They’re invisible. The idea about We Are All Illegals is solidarity. If you’re gonna call them illegal then you better call me illegal too, motherfucker!We’re all illegal. The foundation of this country is genocide, slavery and stolen land.

Mark Ocegueda Q&A ~ Mexicans Played Baseball Too

One of the great stories in this book is of a team from Riverside from the Casa Blanca barrio. This team was comprised of various World War II veterans. All of them may not have been World War II veterans but there were definitely some that [were] and when they would play teams that were mostly Anglo, they would wear their military belts on the field to display to their opponents that they were deserving of equal rights, that they were deserving of full civic membership. They would show these belts while they were playing to show that we served in the military and we gave our blood overseas so we deserve full citizenship back home. These discriminatory polices and segregation that we live through on a daily basis is something that should not be tolerated. Baseball provided this venue for a lot of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans in particular, to display political messages and social messages.

Can Johan Cruyff Save Las Chivas De Guadalajara?

So this announcement appeared yesterday:

And there are thousands of Chivas fans at the Omnilife Stadium right this minute welcoming Johan Cruyff to the organization as the team’s new advisor. The move comes after a 3 – 0 loss against Velez Sarsfield in a Copa Libertadores match this past Wednesday, leaving the team with a win-less streak of 13 games. The club hired a new coach, Ignacio Ambriz, last month and now adds Cruyff to the roster to pull the team out of its slump.

Cruyff, born Hendrik Johannes Cruijiff, is a famous footballer who was incredibly successful as a striker and, later, as a manager. His career began with Dutch team AFC Ajax where he was a star player thanks to his mastery of Total Football under the guidance of manager Rinus Michels. His influence in the Netherlands international team was such that the team never lost a match he scored in.

He then played for FC Barcelona where he scored his most famous goal, known as “The Phantom Goal” and “Cruyff’s Impossible Goal,” during a match against Atletico Madrid:

Cruyff retired from football as an athlete in 1984 and began his career as a coach with the same team he started his career as a player, Ajax, before coaching Barcelona in 1988. He led the team to many championship wins and also trained/mentored a young Josep Guardiola.

Only time will tell how his role will help Guadalajara but a little Dutch influence never hurt any other team.

El Clasico: The Most Intense Sports Rivalry On Earth

This Saturday’s match between FC Barcelona (Barça) and Real Madrid (Los Blancos) will mark the 216th/241st (official/friendly match tally) time the Spanish teams have faced each other on the field. The game is known as El Clásico (The Classic) or El Derbi Español and has grown to become the most watched, most anticipated and most intense rivalry in sports today.

The rivalry exists thanks to a number of cultural, historical, and political reasons.

From Xoel Cardenas for Bleacher Report:

Real Madrid has always been seen as a symbol of Spanish pride and nationalism. Most Madridistas in Spain are Castilians who share relatively conservative political and social views. Most Real Madrid fans in Spain are loyal to the monarchy and continue to value monarchical traditions.

…

Culés {fans of Barcelona – Afro.} are very much opposite in political and social viewpoints. Most Catalans will never acknowledge that the city of Barcelona and all of the land that “was” Catalonia is Spain. Catalans prefer democracy to any kind of monarchical rule. They have more liberal political and social views; they see Catalonia as an unrecognized country.

Madrid is the capital of both Spain and the autonomous region of the Community of Madrid (Comunidad de Madrid) and holds the honor of being the country’s largest city. It became the capital in 1561 after Philip II moved the seat of the court from Seville to Madrid. Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city, is the capital of the autonomous region of Catalonia (Catalunya) in northeastern Spain.

Catalonia has a long history of defending itself against the suppression of its autonomy and its culture from monarchic forces beginning with the rise of the Kingdom of Spain in the 13th century culminating with the fall of Barcelona on September 11, 1714.

The 20th century saw a number of major developments in politics and sports in the country. FC Barcelona was established in 1899 (yes, technically that’s the 19th century but we’ll give it some leeway) and Real Madrid in 1902. King Alfonso XIII assumed power in 1902 and the Copa Del Rey (The King’s Cup) was established to celebrate his coronation. It was in this tournament that both teams met for the first time.

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