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Liga MX closes Ascenso, creates developmental league

By Thomas Buckley

Atlético San Luis was the last Ascenso MX team to earn promotion to Liga MX. The Tuneros defeated the Dorados of Sinaloa in both the Apertura 2018 and the Clausura 2019 seasons to win automatic promotion. (Photo by Cesar Gomez/Jam Media/Getty Images)
Atlético San Luis was the last Ascenso MX team to earn promotion to Liga MX. The Tuneros defeated the Dorados of Sinaloa in both the Apertura 2018 and the Clausura 2019 seasons to win automatic promotion. (Photo by Cesar Gomez/Jam Media/Getty Images) /
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Liga MX Expansión
The Alebrijes of Oaxaca won the Apertura 2019 Ascenso MX Final in December. The Alebrijes will go down in history as the final Ascenso MX champions, but they will have no chance of winning promotion to Liga MX until 2026 at the earliest. (Photo by Jaime Lopez/Jam Media/Getty Images) /

Mexican soccer officials shuttered the financially troubled second division and the Liga de Expansión was born.

The suspension of the Liga MX season has deprived soccer fans of action on the pitch, but over the past two weeks there has been plenty of activity in the boardroom.

League officials and the Mexican Soccer Federation (FMF) have completely overhauled Mexico’s long-troubled second division, converting it into a developmental league that will be called Liga de Expansión.

The first hint of an eventual death blow came in January when the FMF announced that promotion to Liga MX from Ascenso MX was off the table. The accounting firm Ernst & Young had performed a comprehensive audit of the second division and none of the clubs met the established certification standards.

Before the Clausura 2020 season started, the league had been reduced to 12 teams, an historic low, and several of those teams were in dire financial straits. Some reports suggested a few teams were on pace to lose 40 million pesos this year. There were games this season with fewer than 2,000 fans and league-wide average attendance was just 5,135 per game.

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The league had become stagnant, rosters were stocked with first-division rejects and veterans with little incentive other than to extend their playing careers. Player agents colluded with general managers to supply foreigners of limited quality and the product on the field was less and less attractive.

After league play was suspended in mid-March, team reps met and decided to simply cancel the season with three weeks remaining before the playoffs. It was a contested vote (7-5) and players quickly complained that they were not consulted before the decision was made.

A few weeks later, reports leaked that Liga MX was going to address the situation. Some worried that Ascenso MX would simply disappear or that another doomed-to-fail quick-fix would be attempted.

Instead, the initial reports were quite promising. The new Liga de Expansión will serve as a developmental league with team rosters populated by young players fighting to make names for themselves and hoping to earn spots on Liga MX teams.

Liga MX officials announced they would provide financial backing for the next five years during which time there would be no promotion (and thus no relegation from the top division). The goal is to get the new league onto sound financial footing within five years and increase participation to 20 teams, each of whom would be fully certified to earn promotion to Liga MX.

There is still work to be done, but the outline of the plan shows promise and Mexico’s second division would not only be salvaged, but a sustainable framework would be put in place.

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