"Promotion and relegation is what makes leagues become much more competitive. We can't and shouldn't take the dream out of the minds of kids if they live in cities where there's no professional team." That's Arturo Lomeli, owner of Atlético La Paz — and he's losing the argument.
In April, Liga MX and its 18 clubs announced they were breaking away from the Mexican football federation, moving toward an independent structure modelled on the Premier League and LaLiga. The headline reform sounds progressive. The fine print is not: Liga MX wants to permanently eliminate promotion and relegation, cutting off the second-tier Liga Expansión MX from the top flight with no route back up.
How Mexican football got here
The roots of this go back to 2020. COVID-19 nearly wiped out the second division — then called Ascenso MX — and the FMF shut it down entirely, relaunching it as Liga Expansión MX and suspending promotion and relegation for five years as an emergency stabilisation measure. A temporary fix that's now becoming permanent policy.
Lomeli bought Tampico Madero in 2022, relocated the club over 700 miles to La Paz in Baja California, rebranded it as Atlético La Paz, and immediately joined five other second-tier clubs in a legal challenge at the Court of Arbitration for Sport demanding the reinstatement of promotion. CAS rejected the appeal but recommended the FMF restore the system for the 2026-27 season, which kicked off on July 16.
That recommendation now looks irrelevant. Liga MX has also quietly removed the compensation payments that top-flight clubs previously paid to Liga Expansión clubs in lieu of promotion. So not only are second-tier clubs locked out — they've lost their financial cushion too.
What it means for the competitive picture
Without the threat of relegation, Liga MX clubs lose one of sport's most powerful incentive structures. The bottom half of the table becomes meaningless from about March onward. For anyone watching Mexican football or tracking mid-table and relegation-zone markets, that's a significant shift — those odds just got a lot harder to read when there's nothing on the line.
Liga MX's plan also includes forcing multi-club owners to reduce to a single holding and consolidating broadcast rights into a single league-wide deal. These are serious, sensible reforms. A unified TV deal in particular could dramatically raise the league's profile in the United States, which is clearly the commercial target here. The more Liga MX succeeds in that direction, the wider the financial gap between the top flight and the second tier becomes — and the less realistic any future reintegration looks.
Mexico had a genuinely strong World Cup. El Tri won their group, the round-of-16 against England was a game people will still be talking about in ten years, and 17-year-old Gilberto Mora gave the country something to build toward. There's real momentum to capitalise on.
Whether Liga MX's governance reforms are the right way to capitalise on it — by permanently closing the door on clubs like Atlético La Paz — goes to a final vote most likely in 2027. Lomeli can go back to CAS. But he's playing an away game with no crowd behind him.
