The Azteca is Majestic, but the Sound of Chivas' Footsteps Is Growing Louder

Estadio Azteca sits at 2,240 metres above sea level. The air up there is thin enough that an ordinary person who has only just climbed into the stands already feels a weight pressing on the chest. Yet on a night when the whole of Mexico stops to watch, eleven players in red-and-white stripes will press forward as if their lungs had never heard the word oxygen.

Joel Sánchez — a former Chivas player who once wore that same shirt — has just told the newspaper RÉCORD what he sees ahead of the Clásico Nacional. He says Chivas arrive in "an excellent moment". He says the team plays a brand of football that is "balanced, proactive, easy on the eye". He says that whoever steps onto the pitch, the idea never changes. And near the end, he offers a figure that made me read the line twice: at the Azteca, at least 55 percent of the crowd will be Chivas supporters.

I sat with that number for a long time. Not because I believed it, and not because I didn't. It belongs to a strange category of data — a number that cannot be measured with a ruler, only with a feeling. In football, the instinct of a man who once wore the shirt is a weapon that is both sharp and blind.

The sound of the ball hitting the ground is the last sound of the truth. I have always believed that. But sometimes, before the ball touches the grass, someone has already told us where it will fall.

The Clásico Nacional is not an ordinary match. It is the meeting of Chivas de Guadalajara and Club América — the two great powers of Mexican football. On one side stands the club from Guadalajara, a western city that takes pride in fielding only Mexican players. On the other stands América, the club of the capital, wealthy, multinational, willing to spend on stars from across the Americas.

Their meeting is a collision of ideologies. One says: we keep our identity, we trust our own. The other says: we buy strength, we win with quality. In Mexico, people may forget which team won which title in which year, but nobody forgets which side they stood on in this fixture. A child raised in Guadalajara is taught by a grandfather how to look at América. A child raised in the capital is taught by a father that Chivas are the symbol of provincial self-regard.

Joel Sánchez knows this better than anyone. He is a former Chivas player. He has lived through those Azteca nights when the air was thick enough to cut. When he speaks about this match, he speaks as an insider, not as a neutral commentator. And that is exactly what makes his words both worth hearing and worth doubting.

He says Chivas will not tremble. "They go there as if they were playing at home," he says. He does not use the word "hope". He uses the words "as if". In football, the distance between those two is the distance between a wish and a proof.

On the opposite touchline will stand Gabriel Milito — an Argentine name, a centre-back of an older generation, a man who once played for Barcelona and for Argentina. He arrives at Chivas not with the aura of an innovator, but with the stubbornness of a man who understands that organisation is the only weapon available to a club constrained by money. Milito is mentioned by Joel Sánchez with a rare respect.

But I have seen too many times a team praised before a derby, only for those praises to dissolve, three days later, into a question nobody answers. Mexico is no exception. In a country where football is close to a folk religion, the mood of a crowd can peak within a week and collapse within ninety minutes.

We do not watch football with our eyes, we watch it with memory. But there are things memory cannot help us see. Memory cannot help us count whether exactly 55 percent of the stands are wearing red-and-white stripes. Memory can only remind us that the last time, people said exactly the same thing, and the last time, the result was different.

The football Joel Sánchez describes has a specific name in my dictionary. What imprint has Milito left on Chivas? According to the former player, this is a side that proactively controls the ball, but is "more uncomfortable when it does not have it, because it is desperate to recover the ball in the opponent's half". Translated into the language of analysts, this is counter-pressing — pressing immediately after losing the ball — or a high press.

The system is not original. It sits in the mainstream of modern football, a current that runs from Guardiola's Barcelona through Klopp's Liverpool and Dortmund, through Tuchel, through Nagelsmann, and then down into smaller leagues in Asia and Latin America. The difficulty is not the idea. The difficulty is execution. A high-pressing team needs three things: fitness, organisation and consent. Remove one, and the system cracks like a mirror under a light tap.

The key point is this: if a high-pressing side truly maintains its idea regardless of who plays, that is evidence that the system has beaten the individual — but it is also a sign that the team has no tactical retreat left.

This is what Joel Sánchez emphasises, almost inadvertently. He says that "whoever plays, the idea is the same". If true, it points to a deep coaching imprint. A team whose substitute steps on and does exactly what the starter did has reached a level of organisational maturity. It reduces dependence on a single name. It makes the opponent harder to prepare for. It allows the coach to rotate without rewriting the score.

But there is a flip side. When a team says "we play this way with anyone", it also says "we do not change". And América is a very hard test of that constancy.

Imagine a high-pressing side, surging forward to win the ball, leaving space behind. América — with their tradition of fast, technical attackers and their ability to switch states quickly — are exactly the kind of opponent who can punish that space. In football, the high press and the counter-attack are two faces of the same coin. The team that pushes up too far leaves its back door too wide.

That is why I say that "whoever plays, the idea is the same" is a sentence both confident and dangerous. It is confident when the team wins. It is dangerous when the team meets an opponent who knows what to do.

Joel Sánchez says something else I noted down: "Chivas' goal-scoring capacity is distributed across all lines". The sentence sounds simple, but it carries a tactical weight.

In modern football, a team whose goals come from many positions is a team hard to lock down. If you have only one scoring striker, the opponent needs only one marker and one deep midfielder cutting the supply. If goals come from midfield, from advancing full-backs, from set pieces, then the opponent must spread resources across the width of the pitch. They can no longer afford to man-mark aggressively. They must choose, and every choice leaves another gap.

But — and here I must slow down — this is the claim of one man, not a statistic. I have no xG. I have no shots-per-match figure. I have no heat map of goals. I have no PPDA to measure pressing intensity. I have only Joel Sánchez's sentence, placed inside a pre-derby interview, where every utterance tends to flatter the club one loves.

That is a blind spot I want to name. In a big match, people rarely lie, but they often choose the truth that suits them. The truth "Chivas distribute goals across all lines" may be accurate, partly accurate, or accurate only across a handful of recent games. There is no way for me to verify it from inside this interview. And once it cannot be verified, I must write it with an invisible pair of quotation marks around it.

There are goals that do not live inside tactics; they live inside the air. And the air at the Azteca is a very specific kind of air — thin, dry, and loud.

I have stood in a stadium at a similar altitude, not the Azteca but a mountain ground on another trip. I remember stepping out of the hotel, taking a breath, and feeling that breath fail to reach the bottom of my lungs. That day, the away team played beautifully for forty-five minutes and collapsed for the next forty-five. Not because they were poor. Because their oxygen had run out.

This is the variable Joel Sánchez never mentions, and I wonder why. A high-pressing team that runs and runs, desperate to win the ball in the opponent's half, will play this match under conditions in which every extra metre is taxed. If Milito does not rotate wisely, if he asks his players to sustain pressing intensity for ninety minutes, then by the seventieth minute his side may become a different team — slower, deeper, and wide open.

I have no data on the minutes played by Chivas' key men in recent weeks. I have no information on their average running volume. I have no muscle-injury history to assess risk. I have only one former player's claim that this team "plays well in every line". And "plays well" cannot be measured by eye when we do not know how many kilometres the team has run.

That is why I believe this Clásico will not be decided by a diagram. It will be decided in the sixty-fifth minute, when the away side's lungs begin to speak, and when the coach must choose: keep the idea, or change the idea to save the match. The answer to that question lies outside the RÉCORD interview. It lies on the bench, in the names Joel Sánchez does not mention because they have not yet played.

And then comes the number: 55 percent.

I want to treat this number seriously, because it is the heart of the whole interview. Joel Sánchez says that at the Azteca, at least 55 percent of the crowd will be Chivas fans. If true, it means Chivas walk into their opponent's home with more supporters than the opponent. That is a psychological edge few clubs in the world possess. It is also a statement about brand power: Chivas are not a local club, they are a national club.

But look at the structure of the number. Fifty-five percent is a round, tidy figure. It comes with no source, no method of measurement, no sample. It is an estimate — and a deliberate one. In derbies, the claim "your stadium, our stands" is an old psychological technique. It makes your team feel bigger and the opponent feel smaller, if only in words.

There is something interesting here: across years of watching derbies around the world, I have noticed a rule. The attendance figure always feels larger to the side that states it. In Scotland, each side claims to be the majority in the other's ground. In Vietnam, I have heard friends from Hai Phong insist that an entire away stand changed colour because of them. This is not lying. It is how a crowd's feeling measures itself — in songs, in colours, in the sense of belonging.

Every run is an unfinished line of poetry, waiting for someone else to complete it. And every attendance figure is a similar line — it is only beautiful when someone else believes it.

What struck me most in this interview is not the tactical section. It is the passage where Joel Sánchez talks about the board.

He says: "The sporting management, people who rarely appear in public, says a great deal about their work". And: "The owner, Amaury, deserves great credit for the way the team functions".

In the language of football people, this is a weighty compliment. When a former player spends time in a short pre-derby interview praising the board, it means a certain stability is being built — or is meant to be built. At a big club like Chivas, where fan pressure can cost a sporting director his job in two months, a sporting management that "rarely appears" while doing good work is a precious thing.

But I have no wage bill. I have no revenue. I have no financial statement. I do not know how much Chivas spend on players, how much they owe, how much broadcast money they hold for next season. I have only a few words of praise from one man, and in my world, these words belong to a different category — public relations, not finance.

That matters. A pre-derby interview, published in Mexico's biggest football newspaper, featuring a former player of one of the two clubs, praising his old side from A to Z, from coach to owner, is a media product. It has value. But its value lies in telling us how a club wants to be seen. Not in how it actually is.

There is another detail I keep. Joel Sánchez speaks of Chivas' pillars: experienced players and World Cup participants, alongside young players seeking to establish themselves. He says Chivas' growth "also benefits the Mexican national team".

In the context of Mexican football, this carries a special meaning. Chivas exist under an almost religious policy: Mexican players only. It is a choice that runs against the tide of modern football, where money can buy any player from any country. While América buy stars from across the Americas, Chivas search for Mexicans everywhere in the world.

This means Chivas' success is almost automatically the success of Mexican football. If Chivas develop a player good enough for the highest level, the national team benefits. If Chivas play well with home-grown players, Mexican fans gain further proof that the domestic game does not need to import in order to succeed.

But this argument has two edges. On one side, it makes Chivas a symbol of identity. On the other, it raises a question: if Chivas depend on such a restrictive policy, can they compete at continental level against clubs that are not restricted? That is a question no pre-derby interview can answer.

And I remember something I learned in Vietnam. In a country whose football is not yet big enough to buy stars from around the world, people build teams with what they have. The Chivas policy sounds strange to a European, but to anyone who has followed football in a developing league, it is familiar. It is a way of saying: we have no money, but we have an identity. And identity is an asset no one can buy.

Now I want to speak about the blind spot of this entire interview.

The biggest blind spot is that it has only one source. Every claim in it — from "Chivas play balanced football" to "55 percent of the stands", from "the coach receives the credit" to "the team benefits the national side" — comes from one person. Joel Sánchez is a former Chivas player. He is a man who loves his old club, perhaps sincerely. He may even remember his years there through a warm light that tilts his judgement.

In data analysis, this is called single-point-of-view risk. It does not mean the speaker lies. It means the speaker selects the truth that fits what he wants to see. And in football, this happens every week.

It would be a mistake to read this interview and nod as if it were a technical report. It would be another mistake to dismiss it as worthless. The correct reading lies in between: it is a mirror reflecting Chivas' emotional state before a derby. And that emotional state can tell us something important about risk.

When a club's fans are "more excited than ever", when even the press writes warm words "strangely", that is the moment expectation overtakes evidence. I have seen this many times. A team plays well for a few matches, the press changes its tone, the fans begin to believe this season will be different, and then a defeat arrives, and everything built over three weeks collapses in a single night.

In the newsroom, people give this phenomenon a simple name: a bubble. And every bubble bursts. Not because reality is bad, but because expectation has run too far ahead of it.

I am not saying Chivas will lose. I am saying that any result other than a Chivas victory over América will produce a psychological shock larger than necessary. Because expectation has been pushed high, the fall will hurt more. And in football, hurt tends to turn into anger, and anger tends to find the coach.

Let me say more about América, because across the whole interview this club barely appears. Joel Sánchez talks endlessly about Chivas. He talks about "they", "we", the idea, the excitement, the owner, the World Cup. But América — the opponent, the host, the club on the other side of the line — is barely given a single concrete analytical sentence.

That is a striking gap. A pre-derby interview that says nothing about the opponent is either a confident interview or an evasive one. As a writer, I lean towards the second. If a team had truly prepared for its opponent, the story would have room for the opponent. Here, there is none.

América are a club with a winning tradition at the Azteca. Their home, their history, their budget — all give them an edge no figure of 55 percent can erase. If América choose to sit deep and counter, waiting for Chivas to push up and punishing them with quick transitions, then Chivas will fall into the trap they set for themselves. A team "desperate to recover the ball in the opponent's half" is a team that leaves space behind. And at the Azteca, where the air is thin and the lungs are heavy, that space grows larger still.

This is why I treat this interview as a document of psychology rather than of tactics. It tells us what a team thinks of itself. It does not tell us what they will do when the opponent actually appears.

Joel Sánchez says one thing I want to save for the end: "The demands and responsibilities grow". This is the most important sentence in the whole interview, and perhaps the one people will remember least.

Because it states a law of football few want to hear. Success does not make life easier. It makes life harder. When a team is still doubted, people forgive them when they lose. When a team has been recognised, people rage at them when they lose. Joel Sánchez, who has lived inside a big club, knows this better than anyone. He says earlier tournaments carried "a little doubt", and now there is "more stability". But stability has a price. The price is expectation.

For Milito, this means his own pressure is rising alongside his team's success. He is praised now, but that very praise is a cord that will tighten around his neck if results fall. In football, people forget that praise and blame are two ends of the same stick.

And I, from where I sit, remember what a veteran Italian journalist told me over a beer in Kazan, after France beat Argentina in 2026. "You write like a love letter," he said, "but do not forget the ball has weight. Touch it before you fly."

I have touched that number, 55 percent. It is light. So light that I believe it is not a number at all, but a poem. And a poem cannot be measured in percentages.

The rain over Kazan did not soak shirts; it soaked history. That night, watching Mbappé run, I understood that football has moments when all analysis steps back and yields to something only the eye can catch. But afterwards, when writing, I still had to return to the ball, to distance, to touches.

So what is worth keeping from this conversation?

Keep the image of a club on the rise, finding an idea, with a coach who receives the credit, a quiet board, veteran pillars and young players growing up. It is a beautiful story, and beautiful stories in football deserve to be told.

Keep the image of a stadium at 2,240 metres, where the most beautiful idea can be choked by oxygen.

Keep the image of a former player standing between two worlds — between memory of his old club and the duty to tell the truth about it — and choosing to lean towards memory, as all of us have done.

And keep a question no one can answer before the match begins: if Chivas really play that football at the Azteca, if they really press for ninety minutes at 2,240 metres, if they really have 55 percent of the stands behind them — then this club is not merely preparing for a derby. They are preparing a statement about themselves.

A CV can never capture the moment the ball passes a man and time stops. Neither can a pre-derby interview. It tells only half the story. The other half will be written on the Azteca grass, across ninety minutes, by the players Joel Sánchez calls "balanced, proactive, easy on the eye". And if, after the match, we hear the sound of the ball hitting the ground, that is when we will know the final truth.

For now, before the match, everything is applause. And applause, however loud, cannot score a goal. The only thing applause can do is make a team believe it has already won before kick-off. That is the most dangerous gift a crowd can hand a team. And at the Azteca, that gift can come from either side.

When the Clásico Nacional ends, when the final whistle sounds and the stands begin to empty, one team will walk into the tunnel feeling it has proven something, and the other will walk in feeling it has missed something. Joel Sánchez, somewhere in the stands or in his own living room, will see what he predicted, or what he failed to predict. But by then, the figure of 55 percent will no longer matter. What remains is the score, and the memory of what happened on the grass.

That is the most beautiful and the most cruel thing about this sport. Every word can fly high, but only the ball touches the ground.