Will Mexican Soccer Ever Return to Promotion and Relegation?

Mexican soccer had a good World Cup. 

El Tri won its group, and its round-of-16 match with England was an all-time classic. In 17-year-old Gilberto Mora, the team may have a star to build its next generation around. The country’s purpose-built soccer stadiums in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey provided the most traditional atmosphere of the tournament. 

Mexican soccer’s governing body, its clubs, and its players all want the country to capitalize on a World Cup bounce.

In 2022, Arturo Lomeli, founder of the Clase Azul luxury tequila brand, bought a Mexican soccer team, Tampico Madero. The team’s home ground needed expensive refurbishment and its owner, Grupo Orlegi, did not want to invest. Lomeli moved the team from Tamaulipas on the east coast to La Paz in Baja California, more than 700 miles away. The new team was rebranded Atlético La Paz.

“We are creators. We don’t want to manage assets. We like to create where there is nothing and make it work,” Lomeli told Front Office Sports on a recent episode of Portfolio Players. 

Under his ownership, the team has consolidated its place in Mexico’s second tier, making the playoffs again at the end of the 2025–26 Clausura competition.

But Lomeli and other owners like him in Mexico’s second tier face a formidable challenge to grow their clubs much further. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the league, then known as Ascenso MX, to the brink. The Mexican football federation (FMF) shut it down and relaunched it under a new name, Liga Expansión MX. It also halted promotion and relegation between Liga MX and the second tier for five years as part of its financial stabilization plan.

After Lomeli bought La Paz, he joined counterparts at five other clubs in a legal case against the federation at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The team demanded an earlier return for promotion and relegation. CAS rejected its appeal but recommended that the FMF stick to its timetable and reinstate the previous system for the 2026–27 season, which began July 16.

“Promotion and relegation should come back to Mexico,” Lomeli told FOS. “Promotion and relegation is what makes the leagues become much more competitive. We can’t and shouldn’t take the dream out of the minds of kids if they live in cities where there’s no professional team.”

In April, though, Liga MX and its 18 clubs announced they were breaking away from the Mexican federation. It intends to operate as an independent company, with a structure similar to that of the Premier League in England and LaLiga in Spain. 

But where those two leagues remain connected to the competitions below them, Liga MX wants to cut off promotion and relegation permanently. It also removed the compensation payments paid by the club that finished in the bottom places of the Liga MX table that was distributed to Liga Expansion MX clubs as compensation for the lack of promotion.

If approved at a final vote, most likely in 2027, it would leave Lomeli and his contemporaries locked out. The only way back into Liga MX would be through the same route that Lomeli used to acquire Tampico Madero: to buy the license of an existing team, or by contesting the ruling at CAS.

“Football is like life,” he argues. “You can do everything correct during the training in the week and at the game at the weekend, something goes wrong and you are crying because you lost. You never know.”

Meanwhile, Liga MX will continue with its own governance reforms, which are intended to make the league a more attractive proposition for foreign investors and raise its profile in the U.S. Among the items on the slate are forcing owners with stakes in more than one club to revert to a single holding and renegotiating individual broadcast contracts into a single league-wide agreement. The more success that Liga MX has in pursuit of these goals, the wider the gap to the second tier will grow.