Two Empty Chairs in Mexico's Senate: Arriola and Iturbide Skip the Hearing on Promotion and Relegation

I watched the recording of the session four times before writing the first line. On the presiding table of Mexico's Senate, two chairs still carried nameplates: "Mikel Arriola" and "Francisco Iturbide". Glasses full, microphones off, chairs empty. Throughout the hearing on the cancellation of promotion and relegation, the two most powerful men in Mexican football — the commissioner of the Mexican Football Federation (FMF) and the executive president of Liga MX — never appeared.

I was not in Mexico City. I sat in Paris, more than nine thousand kilometres away, in front of three screens and a cup of coffee gone cold. At 63 there is no need to chase breaking news; I only need to sit still and listen to the dressing room breathe. This time, what reached my ears was the calculated silence of football's administrators.

The session was convened on 21 September by Senator Clemente Castañeda, coordinator of the Movimiento Ciudadano party. Its title was accusatory rather than technical: why is the cancellation of promotion and relegation unjust. The organisers split the session into two discussion tables — one on sporting and labour implications, one on the governance and economic impact of closing the competition system.

The guest list included second-tier clubs: Cancún FC, Leones Negros, Mineros de Zacatecas, Atlético La Paz, Atlético Morelia. These are the clubs whose path upward has been blocked, the parties most directly affected. They came. They spoke. Above them, where the power to open or lock that gate resides, nobody came.

Liga MX suspended promotion and relegation in 2026, and that decision has never been reversed. The top division operates as a near-closed league; Liga de Expansión sits directly beneath it, in the same country, with the same stream of supporters, but excluded from the sporting and economic rewards above.

I have spent many seasons rewinding late-season matches from closed leagues, and my notebooks always carry a private mark for them: running intensity drops at both ends of the pitch, midfield duels thin out, sideways passes increase. When a team at the bottom of the table has nothing left to lose, the second half of the season surrenders the most expensive thing it owns — tension.

In an open system, the fear of relegation is a crude but effective motor. In a closed system, that motor is replaced by contract logic. Owners stop fearing for their place, players stop fearing for their jobs, and the bottom of the competitive pyramid — precisely the part sold to television every week — grows thinner.

What most coverage skips is the economic substance behind the 2026 decision: a system without relegation turns a league place into a protected asset, rather than a position earned by results on the pitch. In a franchise model, owners pay to enter the house, and they do not want that investment revalued because of one bad season. Those protected are the ones already inside. Those who pay are the ones standing outside the door.

For Cancún FC, Leones Negros, Mineros de Zacatecas, Atlético La Paz and Atlético Morelia, the revenue ceiling is blocked from above: no promotion bonus, no share of top-flight broadcasting money, no marquee fixtures. The sporting ceiling is blocked in the same way. A twenty-year-old at Liga de Expansión has no clearly defined route to prove he belongs in the top division. He is judged by an administrative decision, not by form. Ash remains in every thread — I learned to read matches from the last shirt, and the shirt of a second-tier player is never hung in the light of the biggest stage.

The real contest happens at the gate. The administrators hold the gate. The second-tier clubs ask to pass through it. When the gate is locked by paperwork, the blocked group looks for another room — and it found one in the Senate, where a sporting argument is translated into legal language.

The central concept Castañeda built was "justice and social mobility", carried by a proposition heavier than it appears: sport is a matter of public interest. Once sporting activity is defined as a public interest, a federation's private decisions must answer to a far wider audience than its own boardroom. That is why the relegation argument walked out of the federation's building and into the legislature.

One rule question remains unanswered. The FMF statutes almost certainly contain provisions governing promotion and relegation. Whether the suspension of that mechanism required a formal assembly vote was never clarified at the session. If the answer is yes, the dispute is no longer about fairness; it is about the validity of a document.

The easiest way to tell this story is to turn absence into proof of guilt. I do not take that road.

The record contains no line confirming that Arriola and Iturbide refused to attend. Absence, by itself, does not establish that they formally rejected participation. The space between "did not come" and "did not want to come" is a deliberate space, and I have known that kind of space for forty-seven years around dressing rooms. Two hundred hours of footage taught me that hands speak before mouths learn to lie — in sports politics, silence is also a gesture, and it too has grammar.

The calculation behind that gesture is fairly clear from the observer's chair. Attending a forum built around the premise that you are wrong, with microphones open and minutes on the record, legitimises the premise. Not attending still draws criticism, but concedes nothing on the record. The price is short-term reputation; the gain is long-term autonomy. I have seen sports officials in many countries make exactly this calculation.

Another blind spot lies in the structure of the session itself. With the administrators absent, the entire record — experts, lawyers, former players, journalists, second-tier club leaders — was produced by the party that believes it has been treated unjustly. That does not make them wrong. It only means I have heard one side, and I do not draw conclusions from a single camera angle.

There is one more blind spot few want to name: second-tier clubs have interests of their own. For the owner of a Liga de Expansión team, the hope of promotion is the bulk of the asset's value. The banner of justice they raise is genuine, and it also has a price. Recognising that does not diminish the injustice; it simply places who is speaking, and for what.

One last point worth holding onto: a Senate session does not legislate for a football federation. This hearing is non-binding. Its power lies in putting the question on the table and keeping it there, across months, across sessions.

The signals I will track next are not on the pitch but in four kinds of document. A formal statement from the FMF or Liga MX defending the closed system — if it arrives late, that delay is itself data. A second Senate session, or better, a bill. Collective legal action from the second-tier group. And any broadcasting revenue-sharing mechanism offered as compensation in place of promotion.

Not every fever deserves to be chased — I stand outside the firewall to see the fire clearly. The fire in Mexico City burns slower than a derby, but its ash falls exactly where I am used to looking: where someone decided that nobody should be relegated anymore, and forgot that somebody was still waiting to be promoted.