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 Editorials | At Issue | June 2006 
Mexico's Booming Business of Soccer
 Jörg Kramer - Spiegel.de
| | Jose Fonseca of Mexico is put under pressure by Mendonca of Angola during the FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 Group D match between Mexico and Angola played at the Stadium Hanover on June 16 in Hanover, Germany. (Clive Mason/Getty) |
Mexico's economic rise is powering a self-sufficient football industry. Soccer in the country is undergoing a renaissance, as players enjoy big salaries and stay at home rather than head for Europe's top leagues.
An eerie silence suddenly descends over the Azteca Stadium, a colossal concrete cauldron that holds 105,000 spectators. It is a stunned silence. The next day's papers will carry a photo of Marta Sahagún, Mexico's first lady, seated in her box, hands over her mouth - as though the unthinkable had happened.
It had. Following an innocuous-looking corner, the "Tigers" - the outsiders from Nuevo León - had just taken a 4-1 lead over the "Eagles" of Club América. Now, in the dying minutes of the league championship's quarterfinal playoff, the game is up for the blue-and-yellow clad powerhouse from the capital. Their season has turned into a fiasco; the manager's days are numbered. And the fans, who had defied each new calamity with wild fanfares from their plastic horns and joined in every chant and chorus blasted through the public address system, are now utterly still.
The excruciating lull lasts but a few minutes. Then the final whistle sounds, signaling yet another mood swing. Bravado returns, and the porras - the hardcore fans in the stands above the players' tunnel - begin waving their yellow balloons again. They cheer their downtrodden heroes off the pitch with shouts of "Olé!"
In this country, football fever is expressed in strange ways - with an almost childlike exuberance. Every buildup on the pitch, every crowd reaction, even every off-field transfer involving a Primera División side triggers emotional outpourings: blaring horns, stubborn silence, angry disputes. Every picardía - every feint and piece of fancy footwork - sparks powerful passions.
Malice too is rarely repressed. In the lower reaches of the Azteca, where the air hangs heavy with exhaust fumes and reporters corner the stars, a light-colored van passes the huddle in front of the interview dais. Some journalists recognize América players seeking to escape the media gauntlet. The reporters give chase just like mischievous youngsters, unleashing a spiteful "Hasta luego" to the divas cowering behind the tinted windows: "Catch you later."
The capital is sunny the following day. Despite the winter month, spring is already in the air. Behind his own tinted windows, the Mexican football federation president Alberto de la Torre roars through the leafy green Colonia Roma neighborhood in his Jeep.
De la Torre is running 90 minutes behind schedule. He's been meeting with a delegation of team owners at an undisclosed location. They've just reduced the quota for foreigners on each team from six to five players, a move designed to protect homegrown talent. New dates for upcoming games were also on the agenda, as were the whims and wishes of the TV networks.
Television fuels the fires of emotion in this industry. Televisa, the market-leading media giant, owns three first-division teams and four TV channels, flanked by radio stations, magazines and betting shops. Club América too is part of its empire. And if Mexican President Vicente Fox attends a match with his wife, he does so as a guest of Emilio Azcárraga, Televisa's CEO. The company pays $12.5 million a year for the broadcasting rights to Club América's archrival Chivas of Guadalajara.
De la Torre apologizes for his late arrival and explains his organization's position: Football is "good business" for Mexican television: an estimated audience of 80 million watched the showdown between Chivas and Pumas, he notes. The investment is personally motivated as well: "The team owners support the game because they're fans, too."
There is certainly no shortage of cash. With its close links to the U.S., Mexico is one of the world's top ten economies. The currency is stable, unemployment low. In industrial terms, however, it remains an emerging country, plagued by stubborn poverty and unease over the mounting Chinese threat.
From a sporting angle, at least, the ROI is substantial. The league is booming. The youngsters in the Under-17 team are world champions. Mexico's national team beat Brazil at the 2005 Confederations Cup. Chivas reached the semifinals of last year's Copa Libertadores, the Champions League of Latin America. In the Copa Sudamericana, the equivalent of the UEFA Cup, Mexico City's Pumas made it all the way to the final before meeting their match in Boca Juniors of Argentina. "Mexican football," the popular TV host Javier Alarcón wrote in the newspaper Reforma, "is learning to believe in itself."
Not that it had played a minor role until now. The domestic league commands two-thirds of the sports pages in newspapers every day. Ever since Mexican striker Hugo Sánchez joined Real Madrid in the 1980s, Spanish football has become the second most newsworthy topic in this football-crazy nation. Yet until recently, fatalism has been the order of the day, in a country that has made the final stages of a dozen World Cups. The byword of national self-deprecation was: "Jugamos como nunca, perdímos como siempre." ("We played like never before and lost like always.")
In Germany this summer, the federation president is shooting for a quarterfinal berth at minimum. President de la Torre is a mountain of a man, someone you'd never give "no" for an answer. Still, people say that his past achievements alone saved him from ignominious dismissal last summer: the Mexican squad came under fire at the Confederations Cup after a doping scandal involving two of its members. Now De la Torre, who was fined €12,800 by FIFA, has ostensibly metamorphosed into a crusader against crime and corruption.
Three years ago, for example, rumor had it that the owner of the first-division team from Querétaro - a Colombian known throughout Mexico as "El Tío" (the uncle) - might be engaged in drug trafficking. In no time the federation had bought out the team's license, dissolved the club and reduced the size of the league. "We wanted to scale down anyway," the president said tongue-in-cheek.
Mexican football needs reliable commercial partners. With tickets fetching 50 to 250 pesos (€4-20) apiece, few teams can survive on gate proceeds alone. Only one of the 18 first-division teams is still a club in the traditional sense; the rest are owned by the private sector - breweries, cement manufacturers, construction firms or universities. Ambitious teams like Club de Fútbol Monterrey, which can charge higher ticket prices thanks to the region's industrial wealth, operate on annual budgets of $25 million. Top players can net salaries of $1.5 to $2 million a year.
For football agents like Mauricio García, such stars spell lucrative export deals. With his eye on this pie, he set up his Iconstar agency on a quiet avenue in Guadalajara, a city of 6 million. The air conditioning is running at full blast; his secretary is incessantly blowing her nose.
García opens one of the yellow packages marked "Handle with care" that are lying on the desk, ready for dispatch. They are addressed to the managers of Germany's Bundesliga clubs: DVDs featuring the cream of his 26 clients. These include the established internationals Pável Pardo (Club América) and Oswaldo Sánchez (Chivas), whom García expects to be "one of the top keepers at the World Cup."
Having visited 16 English and 14 Spanish clubs, the agent knows all about European skepticism. "They think Mexico is like Ecuador," he fumes. But for wellknown Argentinean nationals like Luciano Figueroa (Villarreal) and Mauro Camoranesi (Juventus), Mexico's first division has proved the springboard to success. Mexico's captain Rafael Márquez has booked his place in Barcelona's starting lineup, while top scorer Jared Borgetti signed for Premier League outfit Bolton Wanderers last summer.
Nonetheless, European scouts seldom show their faces; to them the market still seems strangely alien. Maybe, García suspects, it is because "our players aren't entitled to EU passports - like the Argentineans and Brazilians." Few Mexicans can claim Italian or Portuguese ancestry.
But with Germany's Bundesliga easing restrictions on non-Europeans, García's fellow agent Juan Andrés Sámono hears opportunity knocking. His agency is opening a branch in Madrid - on the big spenders' doorstep. "Sooner or later the tide will turn," he says.
Right now European teams aren't offering enough. Some five years ago an agent failed to secure a Mexican for a German club. The defender was earning $1 million a year at home and had no intention of moving. Huge television ratings and the game's universal popularity have prompted domestic companies and broadcasters to invest heavily in the sport, catapulting wages to European heights.
In the emerging country of Mexico, players' wages have almost reached European proportions
"Why should they change clubs for a few hundred thousand dollars?" asks Dutchman Dennis te Kloese who - as head scout for Chivas - once initiated a youth exchange program with Ajax Amsterdam. "The weather is better in Mexico, their families are there, and they're fêted as heroes. A few years back a player like Carlos Salcido couldn't even afford the bus ride to training. Now, as a fullyfledged member of the national team, he is treated like royalty, drives a company car and owns a house guarded by security staff."
Another Mexican international allegedly returned home from the Spanish club Racing Santander for financial reasons. And the author, publisher and cabaret artist Germán Dehesa is convinced that the enfant terrible Cuauhtémoc Blanco sealed his premature exit from Spain with deliberate under-par performances.
The Mexicans have a name for the homesickness that afflicts footballers: the Jamaicón syndrome. The defender José "El Jamaicón" Villegas, a veteran of the 1958 and 1962 World Cups, yearned so much for his hometown of Jalisco (and above all for the taste of his mother's pozole) that when the national team ventured abroad, he fell sick with disquieting regularity. Once, in order to escape a training camp, he falsely claimed that his wife was ill. When the lie was exposed he was suspended from international duty for 12 months.
"Jamaicón," Dehesa says with a shrug; it's a common malaise, the Mexican aversion to forays abroad. Then he cites a popular folksong: "O beautiful, beloved Mexico! Should I die far from your shores, people should say I am only sleeping and bring me back to you." That's precisely what happened to Blanco, says Dehesa, who supports the university team Pumas. "Life in Europe is too serious and the football is too physical. So Blanco pretended to be asleep, and the people brought him home."
Dehesa (51) pens columns on politics, soccer and social issues. He has just arrived in Guadalajara for a book fair and - to the hotel staff's surprise - appeared at the reception desk in a wheelchair. Back home in Mexico City he had tripped on the stairs and broken his ankle. His blue surgical shoe sports the Pumas logo.
"Don't pin your hopes on taking off anything else," he dryly admonishes the woman attendant who clumsily extracts him from his jacket. Then he orders whisky on the rocks and launches into today's tirade.
De facto monopolist Televisa tops his list. The audacity of assuming that an overdose of football can cure the symptoms of social injustice! He rages over fallen hero Hugo Sánchez, who - as manager of Pumas - was accused of taking kickbacks in the notorious pay-to-play scandal. And then lashes out at the intrusiveness of TV commercials during games, labeling them "ideological AIDS."
But, injured ankle or not, the scourge of the "soccer society" had still made his way to the stadium just three days earlier. Pumas fans carried Dehesa to his seat, and he was visibly amused to hear an opposition player called Cubero mocked as culero - "wimp."
Cheerful, childlike Mexico. The game itself is different here, too. Players allow each other far more space in midfield, as though content to sit back and admire each other's artistry. The style of play is more attractive and technically demanding than in Europe; more attack-minded, more intricate.
Even at games in half-empty stadiums, like Tecos' home matches at the autonomous university of Guadalajara, a band is always perched in the stands, fueling the frenzy with rousing norteñas.
And after the final whistle sounds, Tecos defender Juan Carlos Leaño takes media questions outside the dressing room - under the watchful gaze of his bodyguards. His father is both the president of the team and the owner of the university. The heavies aren't just there for show. Last summer Cruz Azul's manager Rubén Romano was abducted by a gang of extortionists. A special police unit managed to rescue the Argentinean, albeit 65 days later.
This is the troubling face of Mexican football. But the game's most winning aspect is on radiant display across the U.S. border. Jorge Vergara, the man responsible for Mexican football's northbound expansion, sits in his glass-enclosed office, enthroned behind a two-section monument of a desk designed by the renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Vergara (51) is wearing a headset, enabling him to launch into conversation the instant a call comes in.
And Vergara fields lots of calls. For nearly four years now he has been running the show at Chivas, the country's most popular team after Club América. One in every three Mexicans roots for players sporting its red-and-white stripes. Chivas ranks as one of Mexico's 10 best-known brands; given its tradition of fielding domestic players, it is often seen as a surrogate national team.
It cost Vergara $120 million to buy out rival investors. An entrepreneur and film producer who also owns a team in Costa Rica, Vergara sees no conflict of interest between his work at Chivas and his other businesses. "Our products don't sell as a result of advertising," he maintains.
In 1991 the former barbecue pork supplier founded Omnilife, a company that hawks an array of fitness products, weightloss plans and powdered potency drugs using tried-and-true Tupperware marketing techniques. The organization boasts 1.8 million sales representatives, branches in 16 countries and annual sales of $1 billion.
Whale song pipes through concealed loudspeakers into Vergara's office. A 20-foot framed photograph stretches along the wall. The subject: Icelandic rock formations. In Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara, he is building an $800 million trade and convention center covering almost 600 acres. It will be christened JVC, his late father's initials. Vergara commissioned 11 star architects to design the various parts of the complex, which include a stadium - needless to say, "the finest in the world."
But his biggest venture by far is the conquest of the United States.
An estimated 37 million Hispanics, including 23 million with roots in Mexico, live north of the border; half of them, according to Vergara's estimates, are Chivas fans. One-third of the 50 million soccer fans in the U.S. are Mexican. Based on these figures, Vergara - who "mistrusts anything conventional" according to one of his business partners - is one step ahead of the functionaries running Major League Soccer (MLS), America's professional football league. MLS, Vergara claims, only lets Mexicans play to tap the spectator potential among immigrants. Vergara forged ahead and founded Chivas U.S.A.
The strategic base for his new outpost was Los Angeles: home to current MSL champions L.A. Galaxy, a modern stadium - and 4 million Latinos. In tandem with the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns Galaxy, Vergara now sells the combined broadcasting rights to a sports station.
The potential profit beckoning across the Rio Grande has also attracted the Mexican football federation. The national team frequently plays home games in L.A. or Houston - for $300,000 a pop and the lion's share of the gate receipts.
Insiders expect the Mexicans to conquer the U.S. soccer market - rather than European giants like Real Madrid or Manchester United, both of which have toured the U.S. in recent summers. "The formula is Latinos versus Gringos," Vergara exults. "And we even get to win!"
According to José Alamillo, a U.S. professor of ethnic studies, "Football is a vehicle for resisting American culture."
But when it came to dispatching the Mexican players to California, the Chivas boss hit problems. Defender Ramón Ramírez, for example, did an instant about-face and headed home. The American authorities had refused to issue a visa for his children's nanny. |
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