Is promotion drifting further away? How the new law to bring it back to Liga MX is advancing

Late last winter, at a tea stall in Barishal, I was watching a Liga MX match at two in the morning on a small phone screen. A sixteen-year-old boy sitting beside me asked, ‘Uncle, can the teams in the lower division ever climb up?’ I set my glass of tea down. On the table, the same thermos was still being passed from hand to hand — exactly as it had been in 2026, when four thousand fans at Barishal’s Abdur Rab Serniabat Stadium passed a single thermos through the stands during the Independence Cup final. That night I spoke about the thermos instead of the winner. The Facebook Live final ended, but the letter kept writing itself in my hands.

What was missing from that night’s scoreboard mattered more than what was on it: the absence of fear. In Mexico’s top division, no club can go down anymore. That single sentence has been the quiet foundation of Latin America’s richest football market for six years. Now, beneath that foundation, a legislative initiative is stirring on the Senate floor, and its shadow falls across the empty stands of Liga de Expansión MX.

Context — the league where the lower staircase was removed

Liga MX is Mexico’s top professional football division, made up of eighteen clubs. In May 2026, at a meeting of the league’s owners, it was decided to suspend promotion and relegation for six years. That decision was inseparable from the financial collapse of the second tier, Ascenso MX: drowning in debt, that league was dissolved, and in its place Liga de Expansión MX was born. The staircase was not removed for administrative beauty; it was removed as a rescue operation, designed by the very owners whose assets it protected.

It is against this backdrop that the Apertura 2026 season stands at the far edge of that six-year freeze. In a photograph published by Mexican media, the names of both tiers sit side by side in the caption — Liga MX above, Liga de Expansión MX below, with the photo agency’s credit beside it. An innocuous caption can become the entire map of a country’s football vision; in it, the second tier is the subject of the image but not of the story.

The legal path now under review is an amendment to the General Law of Physical Culture and Sport — Ley General de Cultura Física y Deporte. The Mexican Football Federation (FMF) is the body that would hold the key to applying that law in practice. Two joint Senate committees, the Sports Committee and the First Legislative Studies Committee, are examining the initiative. It was filed by Senator Clemente Castañeda.

Reporting indicates that no vote date has yet been set in committee. That quiet sentence is the most significant line in this story. A law that never reaches the voting agenda does not fall; it erodes, and nobody hears erosion.

One point of factual clarity is necessary here. Nearly every point in this report stands without a named source; only the senator is named, along with the photo credit. The core legislative facts are probably accurate, because they track a public document — but there is no independent verification of the political context, the motive, or the likely outcome. The promoter’s party is nowhere stated. A report that conceals its own political identity leaves the reader halfway down the road.

In forty-one years behind the microphone, I have learned that where a law has no vote date, reality is built somewhere else — outside the committee, in the corridors, in the owners’ dining rooms. On the Liga MX question, that dining room’s door is shut and its window is papered over.

Core analysis — a principle, not a mechanism

At the heart of the initiative is a simple, ancient idea: sporting merit. The amendment would require national sports associations that run more than one professional category to maintain a permanent system of promotion and relegation. Liga MX’s problem was never a problem of the pitch; it was an ownership-protection arrangement, and this law strikes at the wall of that protection.

Here is the crucial subtlety: Congress would not define the competition format. How many teams go up or down, what the competition system is, what the calendar looks like — that power stays with the FMF. The law would declare a principle; the federation would build the machine.

If the law is a promise, the federation is its translator — and something is always lost in translation.

The initiative lists broad categories of requirements the FMF could impose: sporting, administrative, financial, legal, infrastructural and security-related. Alongside them sits a safeguard clause: such conditions must be objective, clear, transparent and public, and must not become unjustified barriers. Read side by side, these two clauses reveal that the initiative was aware of a specific risk.

The financial conditions are the real battlefield. If a federation says ‘to go up you need this much money, this infrastructure, this security standard’, it keeps the door theoretically open while keeping the key in its own pocket. That is precisely why the words ‘transparent and public’ are placed with such emphasis. A condition not written down in public is not a condition — it is a privilege wearing another name.

A general principle of football is worth remembering. When the fear of relegation exists, teams in the lower half of the table tend late in a season toward defensive, draw-seeking, low-block setups; remove that fear and the calculus shifts — the cost of risk falls, the game opens up, and variance rises. In a closed league, the urge to change coaches also fades; with nothing to lose, there is nothing to fear. In Liga MX that effect has worked both ways: attacking freedom has grown on the pitch, while the ladder has vanished for the clubs below.

Liga de Expansión MX today is a feeder with a capped ceiling. You can win there, but you cannot convert a win into top-tier revenue. A club’s value is priced on its future income; and if the future staircase does not exist, then to an investor that club becomes fixed property — not a team, but land.

At this point I speak from my own experience. The Etihad had no crowd, so sixty-three messages became my congregation — on that night of empty stands in 2026, I learned that a stadium’s worth lies not in its structure but in the dreams of the people around it. Liga de Expansión MX is the same: its stands may be full, but beyond them there is a closed door.

A comparative picture helps. The closed North American model — with no relegation — has succeeded through financial stability and centralised broadcast revenue; Europe’s open pyramid draws its vitality from the fear of the drop, though that fear pushes many small clubs into the grave of debt. Mexico was never a fully closed model, nor a fully open one: it stood halfway, and in 2026 its staircase was folded away.

That is the true significance of the law: it is not merely a proposal to restore a staircase, but a proposal to restore a country’s definition of what football is for.

The implementation timeline adds another layer. Under the initiative, seasons already underway would finish under the old rules; the mechanism would take effect in the first full season after a ninety-day adaptation window. Statutes and regulations would have to be amended within those ninety days. Even if the law passes, its effect on the pitch is at least one full cycle away.

This clause follows a common regulatory convention — the protection of the prior state. An ongoing competition is not changed midway; new rules arrive through the door of a new season. Commercially, this is restrained and responsible. Politically, it has a side effect: when a law’s consequences are so distant, the urgency to press for that law fades just as far.

The contrarian angle — the truth nobody wants to say

Now to the part where the story’s most comfortable sentence breaks down. That sentence is: ‘Once promotion returns, everything will be fine.’

First, the 2026 suspension was not the product of simple greed. Ascenso MX was dissolved in financial crisis; owners could not pay what they owed, clubs were sunk in debt. Removing relegation protected the clubs above, and at the same time stopped an urgent bleed. If someone restores only the staircase without restoring the distribution of money, the old disease returns under a new name.

The right to promotion is a political slogan; the capacity for promotion is a financial structure — and without the second, the first is only a sentence.

Second, there is a clear expectation gap here. Readers may assume that a law means promotion is coming back. But the document says the machine will be built by the FMF — how many clubs, what system, which calendar, what conditions. The law is a framework, not a guarantee. If the federation’s criteria are strict, promotion will exist on paper and be a rare ritual in practice.

There is a prospect of a ‘false positive’ outcome here, and it is what I fear most. The law passes, the senator declares victory, headlines read ‘Promotion is back’, fans are satisfied — while the wall of criteria is so high that two clubs might climb in two decades. By then nobody will demand accountability, because the fight is over and the banner has been taken down.

Third, the biggest risk in this story is not financial but procedural. An initiative that sits in committee without a vote date quietly dies — and every time it dies, the closed league becomes a little more normal. A system nobody questions any longer is the system that has settled in most firmly.

Fourth, the accounting of who loses and who gains is uncomfortably clear. The winners would be mid-sized Liga de Expansión clubs with the financial discipline and infrastructure to meet federation criteria. The losers would be marginal top-flight clubs that today survive only on the absence of relegation — no pressure on the pitch, no risk in the ledger, and therefore no urgency to improve.

A club that loses the fear of relegation also loses a little of its hunger to win — this is not consolation, it is arithmetic.

Here I return to Russia 2026, but with a new protagonist rather than the familiar one. In Russia 2026, the boy from Barishal who painted Messi’s number ten on his cheek and wept at the final whistle was not crying over any club’s relegation — he was crying for a promise that would never be fulfilled on his own ground. — Root: Russia 2026 and the Boy with Messi. The draft law now debated in the Mexican Senate is, in effect, an administrative translation of that boy’s question: can anyone ever climb from below?

I have spent my life translating noise into meaning, and meaning back into noise. So I know that what is lost most in translation is the word that was never in the original sentence — silence. The silence in this initiative is the position of the club owners, the federation’s official stance, and any signal from the executive branch. The report contains not one sentence on them. High-probability legislation usually carries more than one political sponsor; here it carries one senator, alone.

My suspicion grows from that silence. A proposal that rests on one person’s political capital does not stand once that person’s attention moves on. And those who profit behind Liga MX’s closed door will never speak openly against ‘sporting merit’ — they will welcome the law, and then blunt its teeth in the language of conditions.

A possible strategic truth may be hidden here. Keeping Congress away from designing the mechanism may not be a forgotten flaw but a conscious compromise — locking the most contentious decisions out of the legislative chamber and into the federation’s cabinet. If so, the law wins a principle while the owners win a machine.

I return to the pitch. From my years of watching and commentating on matches, I can say that in football, change never arrives with an announcement; it arrives with habit. When a club knows its existence hangs on five points in the table, the language of its winter transfer window, its coaching appointments, its investment in youth academies all shifts. That language takes time to change; a proclamation cannot do it.

Takeaway — a question time will answer, not a law

So the real test of this story is not the Senate vote. The real test comes after the ninety-day adaptation window, when the federation publishes its list of conditions — and how much light falls on each line of that list. If the conditions are objective and public, Liga de Expansión MX becomes part of the football pyramid again; if they are opaque, promotion will exist on paper while the boy from Barishal’s question remains on the pitch — unchanged, unanswered.

I do not know whether Clemente Castañeda’s initiative will succeed. But I know that a league which breaks its lower staircase may grow rich, yet it loses its memory. And a football that loses its memory pours the last cup of tea from its thermos into an empty stand — where no hand reaches out anymore.

At this moment, Mexico’s biggest football question is not at the corner flag. It is on the table of a Senate committee. And beside that table stands a generation waiting at a closed door — still not knowing whether the staircase was demolished, or only folded away.

My voice cracked on the sixty-third message. This time, it is the law’s paper that must crack.