9781422286852

Victoria! The Sports of Mexico

12

Dario Carreno of Monterrey (left) and Manuel Lopez of Puebla battle for the ball in a Liga MX match, the highest level of professional soccer in Mexico.

By 1927, an association devoted to fútbol had popped up. Mexico joined the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the international governing body for the sport, in 1929. Every four years, FIFA organizes the World Cup, a tournament of national teams that is the single most important event in the soccer world. Mexico’s national team has qualified for fourteen World Cups, most recently the 2014 event. However, the farthest the team has ever advanced in the tournament was reaching the quarterfinals, which it did in both 1970 and