GUADALAJARA, Mex. – Most days down here, C.D. Guadalajara doesn’t have to compete for attention. As the most popular professional club in soccer-mad Mexico, Chivas (the Goats) commands a massive following that spills out of the city and into every corner of the country.
But they won’t be this weekend’s main act. In an unusual move, the club has opted to push its traditional Sunday afternoon kickoff time ahead to Saturday in order to steer clear of other big game. The goats don’t dare lock horns with the Super Bowl.
It’s a good call. In Mexico, the NFL has a presence. Wander the streets of Guadalajara, and you’ll likely notice the Chargers flags and Raiders caps inside sports store windows. Pick up a daily paper at one of the bustling corner newsstands, and you’ll find playoff coverage inside.
Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city, is an energetic blend of traditional living and cosmopolitan modernity. Head downtown at night, and you’ll find a young and educated generation eager to practice English and discuss other parts of the world. And corporate America’s influence is undeniable: drift too far from the neighbourhoods teeming with taco stands and “tortillerias”, and you’ll run into sprawling avenues of Office Depots and Nike outlets.
The NFL is one more of those brands weaving its way into urban Mexico. Networks like ESPN and FOX Deportes carry live Spanish-language broadcasts every weekend. At the odd bus stop window, you’ll find NFL advertisements screaming the league’s Spanish slogan, “Esto es la NFL”—”this is the NFL”. In Mexico City, the country’s capital and NFL hotbed, games are often streamed in movie theatres.
Guadalajara native Laura Guzmán Aceves started following the league in 2007, initially just to pass slow Sunday afternoons at work. But she became a diehard Giants fan after watching Eli Manning make that pass to David Tyree. These days, she follows the league obsessively.
Her older brother, Luis, likes the Cowboys—one of the many Mexicans who got hooked on Troy Aikman’s and Emmitt Smith’s success in the early 1990s. On Sunday, they’ll cook up some carne asada and some spicy chicken wings to watch the game with some friends.
Guzmán Aceves says the NFL hasn’t yet won over Guadalajara the way it has Mexico City, but that Super Bowl Sunday is a massive occasion.
“It’s the one day you can be certain all the bars will be playing football over futbol,” she says. “Even the Mexicans who don’t know what’s going on will be watching.”
Most estimates peg the number of Mexican NFL fans at about 20 million. In 2005, when the Arizona Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers came to the Estadio Azteca for the NFL’s first-ever regular season games outside the United States, the 103,467 fans in attendance set a league attendance record that stood until 2009. When discussions arise over potential new franchise locations, Mexico City is among the first places named.
But ‘futbol americano’ is hardly a new phenomenon in Mexico. In the 1970s, as the United States saw a sharp spike in Mexican immigration, the sport started growing down south. Soon enough, television networks Imevisión and Televisa began broadcasting games.
At the time, Dallas Cowboys (Las Vaqueritas de Dallas) and the Pittsburgh Steelers (Los Acereros de Pittsburgh) dominated coverage. With their relative proximity to the border, the Cowboys naturally picked up a strong following. But the Steelers’ blue-collar identity resonated with fans in Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico’s big industrial town. On Sundays in Mexico City today, you can find bars full of Steelers fans waving “toallas terribles”.
Despite a contingent of diehard fans, the NFL hasn’t entirely won over the masses. When Guzmán Aceves watches NFL streams in Spanish, she’s often left shaking her head at the Mexican commentators’ mistakes. And she says not everyone wearing the gear is actually a fan.
“When I see someone with a Vikings jersey in the street, I’ll stop them to chat,” she says. “But it usually turns out they’re just wearing it because it’s cool.”
But that just might explain the NFL’s staying power in Mexico. On a regular day inside the baguette shop on Calle Jose Maria Vigil, Alejandro Zepeda stands behind the counter with his Patriots cap on his head, while Rocco Contreras sits across from him wearing a Broncos toque. On his iPhone, Rocco can display countless photos of the NFL apparel he’s collected.
Neither one watches the league that often. For Contreras, it lacks the flow of simplicity of ‘futbol’. But, like many other young men in Guadalajara, they love wearing the gear.
In today’s urban Mexico, the NFL is more than just a popular sport—the store-window jerseys and bus stop ads differ little from the Burger Kings peppering the city skylines, or the “Big Bang Theory” reruns on cable TV. The NFL is one of the staples of American popular culture that’s becoming ever-more-firmly entrenched south of the border.
Down here, you don’t have to understand what first-and-10 means to know that the NFL is pretty cool.
