Bad results lead to multiple Mexican National Team firings

The failures during the Summer of 2022 that led Mexico to miss out on the U20 World Cup and 2024 Olympic Games for the men’s side and out of the 2023 World Cup and the 2024 Olympic Games for the women’s side led to Yon De Luisa to clean house in the organization. U20 Coach Luis Perez and Sporting Director of the National Teams, Gerardo Torrado and Ignacio Hierro were all fired while incredibly, Women’s Mexico National Team Coach Monica Vergara was not fired but was deemed to be under “evaluation” while the new director members, expected to be named at most in two weeks, would make the final decision on her job.

Mexico’s summer in 2022 has been catastrophic. In a tournament where they were heavy favorites to make the final and maybe even win, Mexico lost out in the quarterfinals of the 2022 U20 Championship against Guatemala. The loss meant that not only was Mexico out of the U20 World Cup, failing to get one of four spots to the tournament, but that they also lost the ticket to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. The tournament was being used as a the qualifying tournament to the Olympics, which meant that he loss was by far the most catastrophic in a youth tournament in this century.

Weeks later, Mexico had another historically terrible tournament. Mexico hosted the 2022 W Championship which gives tickets to the 2023 World Cup and the 2024 Olympic Games. The tournament was the most important games for the Senior National Team, and thus Women Football. CONCACAF gets four tickets to the World Cup and also had two tickets to a World Cup qualifying play-in tournament to be played in February, which meant that six out of the eight teams would either qualify or still be in the running for the World Cup. Incredibly, Mexico lost all three matches, including losses to Jamaica and Haiti, and in a tournament at home without scoring a single goal, Mexico therefore was one of the two teams eliminated from the World Cup. By far this event was the biggest failure in Mexican Women’s Football history.

Fans and the media called for action, but it was a surprise that Vergara, who had the worst failure out of all of them, wasn’t fired yet. Still, it was a big move that both top directors in Gerardo Torrado and Ignacio Hierro lost their job over the failures, as well as Luis Perez who also had a terrible performance that might be the end of his young coaching career.

Mexican Federation President Yon De Luisa made the decisions, but a lot of the criticism should fall on him and his tenure. All of this failures fell on him, as well as the fact that he has failed to give Mexico any weapons to improve. The Mexican Federation was silent on the fact that CONCACAF decided to not have an Olympic Tournament for the qualification process and instead combine it. Worse yet, the tournament was played in Honduras, who unsurprisingly did a terrible job of hosting such an important tournament, with Mexico playing on terrible field conditions, to the point they had to move the matches after two games because of the muddy field. Mexico will now host the 2026 World Cup, and have almost no meaningful competition in the mean time, as Mexico hasn’t been able to get back to playing CONMEBOL competitions, either club or National team competitions, as they once did because of CONCACAF’s refusal. During De Luisa’s tenure it has been clear that Mexico has no weight in CONCACAF’s decisions, even though they are the biggest national team and biggest moneymaker for the Confederation because of their popularity in Gold Cup, Nation’s League, and CONCACAF Champions League matches. In the end, not facing CONMEBOL competition is a bigger problem for Mexico than many other problems mentioned and it’s De Luisa’s job to fix that.

De Luisa has said that in two weeks, the federation will fill the vacant spots. Mexico needs to work fast as they can since the 2022 World Cup is only months away, and the federation needs to have people doing those jobs. It was also announced that they will create a different role for Women’s football, so they will have their sole National Team Director, a spot that was previously under Torrado. We will see if the changes make any significant impact, although with De Luisa still keeping his job, it’s doubtful.