With the World Cup less than two weeks away, Mexico should be electric. It's a co-host nation, one of football's most passionate markets, a country that treats the game as something close to religion. Instead, a growing number of Mexican fans have gone from excited to quietly resentful.
The shift didn't happen overnight. When the hosting rights were announced, the reaction was genuine celebration. But between that moment and today, something broke — and the word Mexicans keep coming back to is money.
When the host nation feels like a customer
The accusation is straightforward: that the World Cup has become less about football and more about extracting as much as possible from the people who live closest to it. Ticket prices, corporate hospitality carving out fan access, the slow creep of a tournament that increasingly feels designed for global TV audiences and sponsors rather than local supporters.
It's a complaint that echoes what fans in Brazil said in 2014, what Qatar faced in 2022 for different but related reasons. The World Cup machine rolls through, and the people on the ground — the ones who were supposed to benefit from hosting — end up feeling like bystanders in their own backyard.
For a betting market that will see enormous action on Mexican national team matches, fan sentiment matters more than it might seem. A disengaged home crowd changes atmosphere, and atmosphere changes games. Mexico's matches on home soil were supposed to carry a genuine advantage. Whether that holds if the stands are filled with tourists and corporate ticket packages rather than actual supporters is a real question.
A warning FIFA probably won't hear
None of this is likely to slow anything down. The tournament will go ahead, the sponsorship deals are signed, and the broadcast rights were settled years ago. But the fact that co-host Mexico — a nation that has qualified for every World Cup since 1994 — is generating as much cynicism as excitement two weeks out says something about how FIFA manages its relationships with the countries it depends on.
The football will still happen. Whether it feels like Mexico's tournament is another matter entirely.
