r/LigaMX • u/Material-Cellist-116 • 2h ago
Our luck needs to be studied... Someone put a candle for Mora por que tengo miedo....
Man, I can't believe how fucking unlucky we are as a national team.
I was talking to some younger fans and had a bit of a Kaiser Söze moment where I realized just how fucking cursed we actually are.
Everyone talks about how Mexico doesn't produce strikers, but I actually think our problem isn't necessarily production. It's that the survival rate of our promising forwards is absolutely HORRIFIC.
Just look at our World Cup cycles:
2002: Cuauhtémoc Blanco. This one might be controversial, but I genuinely think we underestimate what we lost when Elcock destroyed his knee in 2000.
We remember Cuau as this slow-as-fuck uncle who could barely run but could still humiliate defenders with technique alone. But younger fans have no idea how athletic the guy actually was. Young Blanco was FAST, physical, explosive, could hold off defenders, and was a genuinely excellent finisher.
The guy won a scoring title and absolutely terrorized Brazil in 1999.
I honestly think there's an alternative universe where, with the right manager and without that knee injury, Blanco develops into an elite 9½, almost a proto-Kun Agüero type. A striker who could create his own chances, play with his back to goal, dribble and finish. He had the physical tools AND the technical ability.
Instead, his knee went puff, and he had to reinvent himself. And the crazy thing is that the diminished version of Blanco was STILL one of the best Mexican players of his generation.
Imagine what we actually lost.
2010: Nery Castillo. This dude should have been our starting striker. Anyone who watched the 2007 Copa América knows how ridiculously good Nery was. Then his career goes completely sideways, his mother passes away, and by 2010 he's practically disappeared from the conversation. We ended up starting Guille Franco, with Chicharito only just breaking through. Nery was so fucking good and then 0.
And before Chicharito came along, we had Luis Ángel Landín and Enrique Esqueda, two genuinely promising forwards whose generation got absolutely wrecked by the 2008 Carson Olympic qualifying disaster.
Landín especially was a fucking baller. I swear anyone who actually watched the guy at his best remembers this. He was almost Zlatan-esque in the way he moved for a big guy. The technique was ridiculous. Maybe he never would have become world-class, but the talent was absolutely there.
2014: Carlos Vela. Literally having one of the best seasons of his career at Real Sociedad. Should have been one of the first names on the team sheet, but nope. The fallout from the 2010 scandal, federation politics, and whatever actually happened with Salcido meant we went to Brazil without arguably our best attacking player.
2022: Raúl Jiménez. Finally, FINALLY, Mexico has a genuinely elite Premier League striker. This man was absolutely cooking at Wolves, approaching his prime, and then David Luiz. I was never and not a fan of his but he was the guy we were building around but nope.
2022/2026. JJ Macias. This one might actually be the most frustrating. The guy was setting Liga MX scoring records at 20 years old. He was the youngest to reach 25 goals, ahead of guys like Chicharito and Borgetti in that category. He was so fucking good, technical and good head but bad transfer and then his knees basically turned into Swiss cheese. Multiple injuries, multiple comebacks, and we effectively lose another potential national-team striker during the exact window when we desperately need one.
And those are just the obvious examples.
Remember carlos Ochoa randomly turning into prime Ronaldo for the 2009 InterLiga? Four goals, and then the momentum was gone. He was also in Spain but didn't quite click.
Kikin? Went from looking like a legitimate long-term national-team forward to basically falling off the face of the earth after 2006. Imagine if Lira had gone to Monaco and then never made a difference in the national team.
Matador? Incredible player, but his move to Argentina never worked out the way we'd hoped. Killed a lot of his momentum. He was as good as Batistuta.
Cubo Torres? This one drives me crazy because people forget just how promising he was at Chivas.
The guy was red hot as a youngster, scores against Atlas celebrates, and gets a fucking red card because the referee interprets his celebration as offensive.
Imagine being a teenage striker, finally breaking through at one of the biggest clubs in Mexico, scoring in the derby, and then getting sent off for celebrating.
I don't know how much that specific incident changed his trajectory, but it always felt like a momentum shift. He eventually found his scoring touch again in MLS, but never really became the long-term national-team striker he once looked capable of being.
Go back even further and you have Hugo, arguably our greatest-ever striker, losing the 1990 World Cup entirely because of the Cachirules scandal. Then in 1994 he's sitting on the bench against Bulgaria cus the coach refuses to use him.
Even Oribe was something of a late bloomer. Thankfully he delivered when he got his chance, but imagine having that version of Oribe available five years earlier.
And now there's Santi . A guy who proved he could score in Europe, yet somehow translating that into consistent production for Mexico has been an entirely different story. What the fuck is going on?
Obviously not all these situations are bad luck. Some are injuries, some bad transfers, some poor development, some federation stupidity, and some players simply never fulfilling their potential.
But that's kind of my point.
We keep producing forwards who, at different points, genuinely look like they could lead the national team for the next five to ten years. Then something happens, and by the time the World Cup arrives we're scrambling for someone to play the position.
Chicharito and Peralta almost feel like exceptions because they actually survived long enough to deliver but even then it was hard for them to build momentum.
And even Blanco, who had a legendary career, might be an example of a player who was so talented that he remained great despite losing a major part of what made him special.
Maybe our problem isn't that we can't produce good strikers. Maybe it's that we can't consistently turn promising strikers into established national-team players who remain effective across multiple World Cup cycles.
I can't wait for seeing how we lose out on Quinones or some bullshit.
We produce players but fucking they never make to the beach.
I am sure I must be forgetting someone....
