Relegation is a soccer team’s biggest fear. It means a drop in fan support, no chance for continental competitions, financial difficulties, and potentially an extended period of irrelevance. In no country is this more true than Mexico, where the 2nd tier Ascenso MX remains an unstable mess compared to its highly successful big brother. Relegation is bad everywhere, but being sent to the Ascenso MX is nothing short of a disaster.
Why? Well for starters, there is only one place of pro/rel between Liga MX and the Ascenso, compared to the usual 2 or 3 that is typical in 18 team leagues across the globe. So naturally, once you drop into the Ascenso, it’s difficult to escape. On top of that, thanks to the Apertura/Clausura system, playoffs, and then the promotion final between the two champions, simply being the best team is not enough to guarantee you promotion.
If a Liga MX power is relegated, it doesn’t matter if they spend enough money to put together a perfect regular season, one slip up in a two game series can sentence them to another year in 2nd division. It’s a harsh and unforgiving system. (Smaller Ascenso teams will argue the opposite of course, but this is from a Liga MX perspective).
In addition to the Ascenso being a difficult to escape mire, it’s also, as previously noted, a complete mess. The number of teams fluctuates every year as franchises fold and relocate. Television coverage is not perfect and fan-bases are difficult to hold on to. It’s almost impossible for a team to retain any relevance as long as they’re stuck down there.
For some relegated clubs, most recently Chiapas in 2017, relegation simply means the end of the road. Despite the club’s best efforts to cling to survival following a complicated sequence of owner manipulation, relegation was the final nail in Los Jaguares’ coffin. Indios lasted just one season in the Ascenso before they folded back in 2011. Tecos held on for two years but eventually dissolved and we reformed as Mineros de Zacatecas.
To summarize, relegation to the Ascenso MX is a terrible fate, and often times can lead to the complete destruction of a team. But this piece isn’t about the problems that plague the 2nd division. It’s about the Tabla de Cociente, the scariest table in all of soccer.
For those unfamiliar, in Mexico relegation isn’t done at the end of the season. Relegation is done after each Clausura, based on your average points over the previous SIX seasons. This system is obviously done to protect the bigger clubs, as the odds of them having a six season stretch of bottom level play are obviously much less likely than having one bad season.
What makes this so scary is that your results from six seasons ago can haunt you. In a way, it’s much worse than having to live with the consequences of your failures right as they happen. You might be a good team, like Querétaro in the 2013 Clausura, who qualified for the playoffs but were relegated (and not allowed in the playoffs) due to the faults of their predecessors.
This means that one bad season weighs heavy on the minds of fans for three whole years until it is scratched from the record. There is a constant air of worry over any team that misses the playoffs even just twice in a row. Once that happens, you’re in real trouble, and even worse, as we saw with Querétaro there might not even be anything you can do to reverse it! You might be relegated before the season even begins.
The ever-present feeling of your club’s inevitable demise is unique to Mexico; in other countries you may need to bite your nails for half a season, but in Mexico, you’re worried about it almost constantly.
Take Tijuana as the prime example at the moment. They’re nowhere near relegation right now, thanks to those back-to-back superlíder seasons they had under Piojo Herrera. But after this summer, those two fantastic seasons will be gone, and Tijuana will be in serious danger. There is pressure on Xolos to “avoid relegation” this season, even though they are not in the mix to be relegated until two seasons from now. It’s a strange and alien form of stress for players and fans alike. You saw Tijuana were 5th in the table above. Look at the table for next year’s relegation:
Combine your club’s constant battle with the demons of two years prior with the fact that relegation is a death sentence for many teams, and you have a recipe for every game becoming important. It doesn’t matter if you’re locked in for 11th place heading into the final week of the season; you better go out and get three points because you’ll need them in a few years.
I know that’s a completely ridiculous sounding sentence but it’s the truth, and while we can debate the Tabla de Cociente’s merit as a method for relegation, there is no denying that it creates some stakes in games that would otherwise have none. Do I like the Tabla de Cociente? In a strange way, yes. I love the poetry of having a menacing judgement day device counting down to the beginning of your favorite club’s dark ages. But would I change the system to traditional relegation if I could? One-hundred percent.
