Four wins in a row. Three of them comebacks. Two of them on the road, including a 2-1 win at Atletico San Luis on Sunday sealed by a brace from 20-year-old Tahiel Jiménez. Santos Laguna, the worst team in Mexican soccer for the better part of two years, suddenly cannot lose.
The cameras found club president Aleco Irarragorri celebrating in the stands at San Luis, and the images went viral within the hour. Of course they did. Everything Aleco does goes viral. That has been the problem.
To understand why a four-game winning streak at Santos is a national story, you have to understand how deep the hole was. Santos opened this tournament with five straight losses. After seven rounds they had one point, a 0-0 draw with Tigres UANL surrounded by defeats to Monterrey, Atlas, Club America, Chivas de Guadalajara, Puebla and Cruz Azul. Coach Renato Paiva went seven rounds without a win in his first tournament in charge. This was not a rough patch. This was the club’s normal.
Because the truth is that this season’s start was not an aberration. It was a continuation. Santos finished last in Apertura 2024 with 10 points. They finished last again in Clausura 2025 with 7 points, the worst tournament in club history, with a club-record 14 defeats. After one respectable semester, they finished last again in Clausura 2026. Three last-place finishes in four tournaments, from a club that won its sixth league title in 2018. Santos have not played a Liguilla since May 2023, and even that appearance was an accident: they finished 13th and only got in because Queretaro was barred from the repechaje. Across the 2024-25 football year, Santos collected 17 points in 34 matches. Home crowds have collapsed too, with half-empty nights at the TSM now routine and one 2024 home game drawing barely 7,000 fans. Fans have worn paper bags over their heads at the TSM and chanted for the owners to leave.
And through all of it, the face of the collapse has been a president who was 24 years old when he got the job.
Aleco Irarragorri, son of Grupo Orlegi owner Alejandro Irarragorri, was presented in October 2024 as the youngest club president in Liga MX history. The nepotism criticism was instant and obvious, and Aleco did not help himself. Where a normal executive would have kept his head down and fixed the squad, Aleco produced moments. There was the luxury tailor presentation in 2025, where he told a room of unimpressed players, dressed for a boardroom instead of a football match, that they were part of “the revolution” and welcomed them to “the new era of Santos.” Fans responded with the line that defined his presidency: now we will lose, but with elegance.
Then, this August, a video leaked of Aleco at a private party, microphone in hand, singing “Color Esperanza” while his team had lost five straight matches to open the season. Puebla beat Santos and soundtracked their goals with the song on their official accounts, a rival club openly mocking a president. Puebla had to delete the post and apologize. Two weeks later, Santos fans booed Aleco’s pre-recorded motivational video off the TSM screens in his own stadium.
If this all sounds like a television show, that is because Mexican fans have been saying exactly that for two years. The comparison is Club de Cuervos, the Netflix series about Los Cuervos de Nuevo Toledo, where the owner’s death hands the club to Chava Iglesias, a young heir who runs his inheritance on branding, slogans and self-belief while the institution rots around him. Headlines have literally called Aleco the executive who outdid Chava Iglesias. A fan’s verdict during the winless start went everywhere: so many words, speeches, songs, and zero points.
Real life even produced a plot twist the show never had. In Club de Cuervos, the father dies and the son takes over. In Torreon, the father came back. In February 2026, with Santos last on one point from six matches, Alejandro Irarragorri held a press conference, announced “first of all, I never left,” seized control of the football committee himself and fired the coach. “Today mediocrity ends at this club,” he said. Under Aleco at that point: five coaches in under two years, and 9 wins in 51 official matches.
So yes, enjoy the streak. Paiva has earned it, Jiménez looks like a genuine find, and three comeback wins say something real about a dressing room that could have quit in August. Santos sit 14th with 13 points, two points off eighth, with six matches to play. The Play-In is suddenly a conversation instead of a fantasy.
But a streak is not a structure. Santos are one bad month from the conversation turning again, and everyone in Torreon knows it, which is why the memes now cut both ways: the same fan base that cast Aleco as Chava Iglesias is watching him celebrate in the stands and wondering if the character arc is real. Aleco posted after San Luis, inviting everyone to “trust, believe, dream.” He has been asking for that trust for two years, through last-place finishes, paper bags and a song he cannot escape.
Four wins bought him something no speech ever did: a week where the joke is not on him. Whether it lasts longer than the streak is entirely up to the club he inherited, and the one he still has to prove he can run.
