Mexican football league celebrates 100 years since its birth

Are you enjoying the top flight of Mexican football? Are you a fan of one of the final four teams battling for this season’s Apertura 2022 title: América, Toluca, Rayados or Pachuca? Well, while the popularity of the competition is strong, and reaching out across the globe, everything needed a beginning, and this particular flavour of the Beautiful Game is celebrating 100 hundred years.

A century of Mexican soccer

That’s right. Saturday 22 October 2022 marks 100 years since the kindling was lit on the game in the North American country that we recognise today. There were various attempts to form a unifying league in the early years of the twentieth century but it wasn’t until 1922 when the Liga Nacional -- which included América, Real Club España, Luz y Fuerza, Amicale and Reforma -- and the Liga Mexicana -- with Asturias, Internacional, México, Morelos and Germania -- joined up to form a single unifying competition. They named it the Campeonato de Primera Fuerza de la FMF. This league prompted the creation of the first National team and the Federación.

You may be ahead of me, but from those founding clubs only América remains in today’s game and curiously they will be in action on the anniversary as they look to overcome a first leg deficit against Toluca at the Azteca Stadium. It was back on 22 October 1922 when América beat Real Club España 2-0 in the first game of the new tournament, with goals from José Camote Izquierdo and Alfredo García Besné.

Asturias was the inaugural winner of that first league by a single point, which ended in June 1923, with América coming in third on 19 points. Germania split them both and had the top scorer of that campaign in Kurt Friederich who notched 12 goals.

We’ve seen the name of the competition change 15 times over the century and have witnessed some impressive performances. Let’s take a look at some of the headline honours.

Liga MX: honours over the 100 years