Dr. Mireya Márquez-Ramírez
Professor of journalism studies and media theory in the Department of Communication at Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City. She specializes in comparative journalism cultures, role performance, media systems, news production routines, journalists’ safety, media capture, news engagement and sports journalism. She is part of the Worlds of Journalism and Journalistic Role Performance projects and serves on top-tier journals’ editorial boards.
Twitter: @miremara
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Unlike previous editions in the country, Mexico’s third time as World Cup host was surprisingly hard to access. Tickets were prohibitively expensive, much of the tournament moved away from free-to-air television into cable and streaming services, and the official experience was tightly policed by FIFA’s brand protection rules, security cordons and VIP commercial exclusivity. Even the iconic Azteca Stadiums’ name was changed twice to fit FIFA’s expectations and rules.
In the age of the ‘sports-media-complex’, Mexico’s experience as host was fragmented in its own house, constrained in how it could stage, distribute and inhabit the event. We supplied the streets, symbols, labor, public money and emotional energy, while key decisions about broadcasting rights, branding, access and commercial benefits were captured and centralized by corporate supranational bodies. FIFA behaved less like a neutral sporting organizer than like a self regulating commercial chamber, simultaneously rule maker and rights holder.
FIFA is formally registered as a nonprofit association but runs a highly lucrative and largely selfregulated business. Drawing on state capture and corporate capture concepts, I define ‘sports corporate capture’ as configurations in which private sports-governing bodies such as FIFA simultaneously regulate and monetise a global sport, control key assets (competitions, rights, brands and infrastructure) and negotiate directly with states and media corporations to extract rents, under conditions of limited statutory oversight and weak democratic accountability.The losers are the public interest, collective enjoyment and the social functions of sport.
In Mexico, this capture startegies materialized in many forms. Around official spaces, brand use was guarded, sponsors were privileged, street vendors and residents were displaced, and Mexico’s informal commerce was pushed aside in the name of order, security and exclusivity. FIFA determined who could sell, who could show, who could profit, who could even visually inhabit the event. Amid the burden of having to pay just to watch all the matches, much of the collective pleasure associated with Mexican football and street life, the improvised food stand, the pirated jerseys, the spontaneous street screen, the noisy bar, sat uneasily with a tournament designed to protect the value chain of official rights holders and global partners, in compliance with local governments.
And yet the fans fought back. Beyond FIFA’s approved fan fests, more public viewings were set up in city plazas, which restored football as a dense public experience, watched shoulder to shoulder by people who were not sorted by ticket tier, hospitality package or monthly subscription. Socially and politically, they were forms of collective action that reasserted the idea that football belongs in common space. They allowed people excluded from premium consumption to turn the city itself into the stadium and generated forms of popular culture that escaped the official script.
Viral moments showed Pato Merlin, a duck in a Mexico jersey that belongs to street vendors, suddenly becoming a non official mascot and later an honorary ambassador of the street parties, and the dancing Doctor Simi green-jersey mascots, oversized plush figures from low cost pharmacy chains that have become ubiquitous at concerts, marches and football parties, worked as small acts of cultural disobedience. They joined the fiesta without logos or conventional campaigns, reminding everyone that mascots do not need corporate approval to exist. They made the tournament vivid, strange, local and unmistakably Mexican, redirecting attention from FIFA’s careful curated imagery to festive absurdity that cannot be fully monetized or centrally choreographed. Resistance is not always organized as opposition; sometimes it appears as appropriation, parody and excess.
The street celebrations at Mexico City’s Angel of Independence made that even clearer. They were not official, and that was precisely the point. People went because Mexicans celebrate football victories and even defeats in the street. The city later doubled security, capped access at the Angel and the Zocalo, banned street vendors and imposed crowd controls after four people died during post match celebrations. Those deaths were tragic, and any serious reading of collective joy has to acknowledge that public euphoria can become dangerous under conditions of overcrowding and inadequate crowd management.
At the same time, enjoyment did not erase what many activists called the World Cup of dispossession. Around the opening match, teachers on strike, transport workers and mothers searching for disappeared relatives protested under slogans like “if there is no solution, the ball will not roll,” facing police cordons, detentions and the use of extinguishers and force to clear access routes. For them, fan fests and televised euphoria felt like an anesthetic layer laid over unresolved pension conflicts, structural violence and tens of thousands of missing people, a spectacle that tried to move those struggles out of frame just as it moved vendors and protesters out of the last mile around the stadium.
But the danger and the anesthetic function do not cancel the meaning. If anything, they show the intensity of a public claim that exceeded the event’s official architecture. The real fiesta of Mexico’s World Cup did not happen only inside Estadio Azteca or within FIFA’s commercial enclosures. It spilled into plazas, avenues and digital afterlives, into songs, memes, mascots and bodies, into forms of collective presence that no sponsor deck can fully script. FIFA captured the tournament through rights, brands, exclusivities and managed space. Fans reclaimed part of it through reception, humor, virality and a stubborn insistence on celebrating together.
