Yon de Luisa was carrying a vivid inexperienced Mexican nationwide crew polo shirt and an excellent brighter smile when he entered Banc of California Stadium on Monday, lower than two hours earlier than El Tri’s ladies’s crew beat Angel City 2-0 in an exhibition.
He hardly appeared like a person carrying the load of his nation’s World Cup hopes on his shoulders. But then seems to be may be deceiving. As the embattled president of Mexico’s soccer federation, De Luisa is taking criticism from all sides — not all of it deserved — lower than three months earlier than his woefully underperforming males’s crew is scheduled to kick off in Qatar.
Mexico’s coach, Tata Martino, picks the crew’s roster and the enjoying type, and he hasn’t achieved a great job with both these days. Club homeowners in the nation’s high home leagues have ultimate say over the agenda and management the purse strings. De Luisa is left to scrub up the mess and clarify the way it occurred.
And these days he’s had quite a bit to reply for with the federation in disaster, having misplaced its identification and its method on the worst time.
Including age-group groups, Mexico hasn’t received a trophy on the boys’s or ladies’s aspect because the 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup, its longest drought in 15 years. In July, after Mexico did not qualify for the boys’s and girls’s Olympic tournaments in 2024 and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, De Luisa fired Ignacio Hierro, the director of nationwide groups, and Luis Perez, the U20 coach, and compelled the resignation of sporting director Gerardo Torrado.
Over the following month, he additionally fired many of the high coaches on the ladies’s aspect, together with senior nationwide crew supervisor Monica Vergara. Twenty months earlier, De Luisa had put feminine coaches in cost of Mexico’s high three ladies’s groups for the primary time. Two of the three at the moment are gone.
The timing, De Luisa acknowledged Monday, wasn’t supreme.
“If I could do it again, I would do it earlier,” he stated. “At the end, what we are doing is we’re designing a stronger sports area within the federation.”
Yon de Luisa, president of Mexico’s soccer federation.
(Agencia Reforma)
Before the change, the federation was a particularly vertical group, he stated, with one particular person in cost of all nationwide groups. Under the brand new construction, Jaime Ordiales, a former nationwide midfielder, will run the boys’s groups and Andrea Rodebaugh, who performed on Mexico’s first World Cup squad in 1999, shall be accountable for the ladies. Pedro López, who led Spain to a U20 ladies’s World Cup title final month, shall be named coach of Mexico’s senior crew shortly, De Luisa stated.
That made Monday’s sport, an uncommon one in that it matched a nationwide crew towards a membership crew, the ultimate bow for interim coach Christopher Cuéllar. The win over Angel City — the scores approaching an personal aim from Megan Reid in the 72nd minute and a left-footed strike from former UC Irvine standout Scarlett Camberos 5 minutes later — was the primary for the ladies’s crew in six video games courting to June. That slide was an enormous disappointment for a crew that entered final July’s World Cup and Olympic qualifying event in Mexico on its finest run of type in a decade.
Every week earlier, Mexico’s U20 males’s crew was eradicated in the quarterfinals of the CONCACAF Championship, costing it a berth in the Olympics, a event it has medaled in twice since 2012. With the alarm bells ringing, De Luisa may not afford to attend to make the modifications he believed had been already lengthy overdue.
A former president of Club América and former vice president of Televisa Deportes, De Luisa, 52, helped convey the 2026 World Cup to North America as Mexico’s consultant on the united bid committee. A month later, he was named president of a nationwide soccer federation in transition, bringing on a brand new coach in Martino and introducing his first group overhaul, one which ended final fall with the primary rebranding of the federation’s badge in 33 years.
Mexico’s Scarlett Camberos, second from left, celebrates with teammates after scoring a aim towards Angel City.
(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP through Getty Images)
The modernization was essential, nevertheless it hasn’t all the time gone effectively.
“It doesn’t look good for the future,” groused one former government who requested that his title not be used.
It doesn’t look good for the current both. The males’s crew has received simply one in all its final 5 and has scored a aim or fewer in 9 of its 13 video games this 12 months. With the Qatar World Cup approaching, that’s not encouraging — one thing Mexico’s followers acknowledged once they booed the crew off the sphere after it newest loss final week.
“As strong and passionate a fan base as we have, that is normal,” De Luisa stated. “It’s normal before the World Cup to have this type of feedback. But it’s not the president of the federation, it is the entire federation that tries to work on our short-term, midterm and long-term objectives.
“We’re always trying to do to win everything we participate in. The Mexican fan base is used to [having] winning periods, and that’s good.”
The fan base is also used to the crew attending to the knockout spherical of the World Cup, one thing Mexico has achieved in each event it’s performed in since 1978. That streak may finish this fall, after which De Luisa is scheduled for a efficiency overview.
“How this works is that after each World Cup, there’s a board meeting where they decide if the management will continue or not,” he stated.
De Luisa will want a miracle in Qatar to maintain his job. The modifications he’s instituted, nonetheless, will proceed. And that legacy may last more than the reminiscences of 1 World Cup.
