The walk to the Azteca on Thursday was a masterclass in cognitive dissonance.
Steel barriers. Armed volunteers. Banda music bleeding through the crackle of police radios. A city that has spent months choking on cartel violence and political paralysis somehow found the air to blow up a few inflatable sombreros and crack open a lukewarm Corona at 10am.
This is the duality of Mexico City in 2025: a World Cup opener that felt like a religious revival, staged in a stadium that sits in a neighbourhood where the daily death toll reads like a league table nobody wants to top.
For 90 minutes, the 87,000 inside the Azteca forgot about the 43 missing students, the decapitated bodies left in ice coolers, the president’s latest tweet that sounded like it was written by someone who’d just discovered a thesaurus. For 90 minutes, El Tri gave them something else to scream about.
And scream they did. The roar when Carlos Vela curled a free-kick into the top corner in the 32nd minute was loud enough to register on the city’s seismic monitors. The place shook. Literally. The upper tier vibrated so hard that a few journalists in the press box instinctively checked under their desks for structural integrity.
South Africa, to their credit, didn’t roll over. They’ve become something of a bogey team for Mexico — remember 2010? — and for 20 minutes after half-time, they pinned El Tri back. Percy Tau hit the post in the 67th minute. The silence that followed was louder than any goal celebration. For a moment, the escape hatch slammed shut, and reality rushed back in.
But Mexico held on. A 2-0 win. Clean sheet. Three points. Job done.
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The stadium as a pressure valve
This is what football does in cities that are falling apart. It offers a pressure valve. A temporary suspension of disbelief. The Azteca, for all its crumbling concrete and dodgy plumbing, remains one of the world’s great cathedrals of escapism.
There’s a reason the cartels don’t hit matches. Not because they respect the beautiful game — they don’t — but because they understand optics. Even they know that turning the Azteca into a crime scene would be bad for business. So the 87,000 get their 90 minutes of peace. The rest of the city gets whatever the night brings.
Manager Jaime Lozano got his tactics right, which is more than can be said for most of Mexico’s recent coaches. He trusted Vela to drift infield, allowed Edson Álvarez to dictate from deep, and resisted the urge to play both Raúl Jiménez and Santiago Giménez — a selection decision that previous regimes would have fumbled. The result was a performance that had structure, purpose, and the occasional flash of genuine quality.
But let’s not kid ourselves. South Africa are not Brazil. They are not even Senegal. This was a group-stage opener against a team that scraped into the tournament via the back door of African qualifying. Mexico should win these games. The fact that they did — and did so with relative comfort — is the bare minimum.
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The other side of the barriers
Walking back to the metro afterwards, the barriers were still there. The volunteers were still there. The police were still there. But the banda music had stopped. The inflatable sombreros were deflating. The streets were quiet in that particular way that only a city holding its breath can manage.
A man selling tacos from a cart near the station shrugged when a fan asked him if he’d watched the match. “No tengo tiempo,” he said. No time. He had to work. The World Cup doesn’t pay the rent.
That’s the thing about escapism: it only works if you can afford the ticket.
Mexico now face Saudi Arabia and Poland in the group. Both are winnable. Both will require more than just a good atmosphere and a nostalgic free-kick. Lozano’s side have a legitimate chance to top the group — and, whisper it, maybe even reach the quarter-finals for the first time since 1986.
But the real test isn’t on the pitch. It’s whether the escape hatch stays open long enough for the city to remember what unity feels like. Or whether, once the final whistle blows and the barriers come down, the only thing left is the sound of a taco cart’s griddle, sizzling in the dark.
Football can’t fix Mexico City. But for one Thursday afternoon, it made 87,000 people forget it was broken. That’s not nothing.