Rafael Márquez and His First Two Draws: El Tri Is Still Trapped in the Same Loop

Rafael Márquez and His First Two Draws: El Tri Is Still Trapped in the Same Loop

One Night in São Paulo

The clock in the small eatery on Rua Augusta had fifteen minutes left before midnight when the final whistle blew. On the crooked screen mounted in the corner, the Mexican players walked with their heads down toward the tunnel. None of them looked up at the stands. At State Farm Stadium, the green-shirted crowd had been thinning since the eightieth minute, leaving behind empty rows blotched like stains on old fabric.

Aurelio, sixty-one years old, originally from Guadalajara and the owner of the place, stood behind the counter and said nothing for nearly two minutes. He wiped a glass with a cloth, wiping the same spot over and over, then set it down. "Same cat," he said in Spanish, his voice hoarse. "Just a different shirt."

I asked him where he had heard that phrase. He smiled and pointed at the television. He said he had heard it a long time ago, before he even left Mexico to work in a textile factory in Brás. But tonight, someone on television had said it again, and suddenly it was no longer a joke.

That someone was Ricardo Ferretti, a man an entire generation of Mexican fans knows by the nickname Tuca. He coached Tigres and Pumas, won the Liga MX several times, and taught a good number of the players who now wear the national team shirt. He sat in the studio of the program Futbol Picante, talking about Rafael Márquez's first two matches as head coach of El Tri, and his voice could not hide its weariness.

I stayed in the eatery for another twenty minutes after the match ended. Aurelio cleared the tables, gathered the paper cups, and occasionally glanced up at the screen replaying a seventy-third-minute passage. He made no further comment. He said only one last thing before turning off the lights: "Twenty years I've been hearing the same story. Only the name of the storyteller changes."

The night in Moscow did not teach me about football – it taught me how a nation holds its shared wound. And at twenty-six, sitting in a tiny eatery in the heart of São Paulo, I realized I was watching another wound being held, this time by Mexicans.

Two Matches, Two Points, One Unanswered Question

Rafael Márquez was appointed to replace Javier Aguirre, the man who had led Mexico into the World Cup hosted on its own soil. It was a handover carefully prepared in terms of image: a former captain who played five World Cups, who wore the Barcelona shirt, who was an icon of a golden generation, now seated in the hot chair. The former player becomes the guide. A beautiful story, tidy, easy to sell to sponsors and easy to tell the media.

But football does not run on beautiful stories.

The first two matches of the new era took place within the Fecha FIFA window. The first, against Colombia, ended in a one-all draw. The second, against Peru, also ended one-all. Two points from two matches, no victory yet, and what irritated Mexican public opinion more than the results was not the scoreline but the way the team played.

Márquez is no newcomer to the dressing room. He was an assistant, he understands each player, he knows how to talk to big egos. But between understanding a group and changing how that group operates lies a very wide gap. And in the past two matches, that gap was plain to see.

What is notable is that neither opponent is currently among the strongest sides in South America. Colombia is in a transition after its generation of veterans. Peru is still wrestling with a squad crisis that has dragged on for years. Mexico failing to beat either of them, at home, with a squad judged deeper in quality, is a signal no coaching staff wants to hear.

Based on my experience following matches, there is a fairly stable rule in international football: a new coach's first two games rarely say anything about his ability, but they always say a great deal about the legacy he inherits. What people call a national team's "identity" is not created in a ten-day camp. It is created over ten years, in academies, in youth competitions, in the way domestic clubs develop people.

And that is precisely why what Ferretti said in the studio that night deserves to be heard rather than dismissed as an old man's grumbling.

The Knot Named Roberto Alvarado

Ferretti did not criticize Márquez for the results. He criticized him for how he arranged the players.

Specifically, he raised a large question mark over Roberto Alvarado's role. For Ferretti, Alvarado is not a bad player. The problem is that he occupies the space others need. "Alvarado blocks their entry," he said, referring to Álvaro Fidalgo and Isaías Violante.

This is a purely tactical observation, and it deserves careful dissection, because it touches on one of the biggest structural problems in Mexican football today.

Mexico's problem is not a shortage of good players, but a surplus of good players all wanting to occupy the same patch of space.

Picture the corridor in the middle of the pitch. It is the zone a playmaking midfielder needs in order to receive, turn, and deliver a line-breaking pass. If two men stand in that zone, they cancel each other out. The ball carrier will not know whom to pass to, the off-ball player will not know where to run, and the entire attacking system collapses into harmless sideways passes.

That is exactly what happened in the two matches against Colombia and Peru. Mexico had more possession, made more passes, but those passes mostly traveled horizontally, from flank to flank, from line to line, never cutting through the opposing defense.

Álvaro Fidalgo is the type of midfielder who needs the ball at his feet, who needs the freedom to move into the gaps between lines. He is not the type to run constantly to stretch the opposing shape. Isaías Violante, still very young, also needs space to develop his feel for the ball and his confidence. When Alvarado – a player who tends to drift inside and look for the ball in midfield – is present as well, all three begin stepping on each other's toes.

Ferretti described the phenomenon with a very everyday image: "One blocks the other's entry, the other closes it off and blocks the remaining one's entry." He said it with visible irritation, as if he had said it hundreds of times and would have to say it hundreds more.

What gives this observation its weight is not whether it is technically right or wrong. It has weight because it points out that the problem has existed for a very long time, across many coaching regimes, and no one has solved it. This is the crux.

If this were the first time anyone had seen Mexico's attack stall because its midfielders overlap, it would be Márquez's fault. But when a veteran coach, who has sat on Liga MX benches for more than two decades, says he has seen this for two and a half years, even before the 2026 World Cup, then the problem lies at a much deeper level.

No Wingers

In the studio debate, there was one notable moment. Ferretti turned to his colleagues and asked: so who are this team's wingers?

The answer he got was Alvarado and Julián Quiñones. But Quiñones was not available for the Colombia and Peru matches. So in practice, Mexico went into those two games without a single true winger in the starting eleven.

Ferretti said it plainly: "From my point of view, Mexico has no wingers, yet it stubbornly clings to that style of play."

This is a systemic observation, and it explains a great deal about how El Tri operated in the past two matches. When a team builds its attack on stretching the pitch horizontally, but has no specialist players to do that job, the system collapses on its own.

The direct consequence is that the full-backs are pushed too high to compensate for the empty flanks. When they go up, the midfield must drop to cover. When the midfield drops, the distances between lines compress, and the whole shape becomes a crowded mass of bodies with no room to breathe.

A team without wingers must choose between holding its shape and creating chances – and Mexico in the past two matches tried to do both, and ended up doing neither.

The next question in the studio was whether Hirving Lozano, expected to start against the United States, could change the picture.

Ferretti answered bluntly that nothing would change. His reasoning was concrete: coaches are asking wingers to track back and cover for the full-backs. When a player like Lozano has to run back into his own half, he no longer has the energy or the position to create danger in the opponent's half. And when he drifts inside, he lands in exactly the knot Alvarado is caught in.

This is a paradox many national teams face. Modern football demands that every player defend. But when that demand is placed on a purely attacking player, what you get is not a winger who can defend. What you get is a tired attacker.

Two and a Half Years and a Question Nobody Wants to Answer

The most striking line of the night was a short one: "Same cat, but a different shirt. We have been in this situation for two and a half years."

This phrasing, in Spanish, carries a very particular irony. It does not mean everything is identical. It means the core remains intact, and only the outer shell has changed.

And this is what made me stop and think. Because in my career writing about football, I have heard similar lines many times, only about other national teams. In Brazil, people say it about the Seleção. In Argentina, they said it in the years after Messi retired. In Vietnam – my homeland – people say it every time the national team changes coach.

Stories about national teams almost always repeat the same template: new hope, ten matches, doubt, criticism, then new hope again – and in between are flesh-and-blood people trying their best inside a system that gives them no room.

Ferretti said Mexico has been in this state since the 2026 World Cup and even before that. That means the problem does not belong to Márquez personally, nor to Aguirre personally. It belongs to how Mexican football operates at its foundational level.

And when he asked his colleagues in the studio, "How many times have we talked about this at the World Cup?", he did not wait for an answer. Because he knows it: too many times, and there will be more.

The Loop Is Not in the Coaching Chair

This is where I want to step away from the bulk of Mexican public opinion and offer a different angle.

Most commentary after the two matches revolved around one question: is Márquez good enough? Should he change the formation? Should he start Lozano? Those are easy questions, because they have clear answers, and they let people feel they are in control of the situation.

But the harder question, the one few want to ask, is: why has Mexican football, after more than twenty years, still not produced true wingers?

Look at how Liga MX operates. Mexico's big clubs have the budgets to buy already-developed foreign wingers, usually from Argentina, Colombia, or Brazil. That makes sense in sporting and economic terms in the short run. A club that wants to win this season will not wait three years for an eighteen-year-old to learn how to dribble at speed.

But the accumulated consequence of those short-term decisions is that after twenty years, the national team has no properly developed wingers from its own country. And when the national team needs someone to stretch the opposing shape, it must choose between a central midfielder pushed out wide, or an attacker who has been asked to track back so often that he has lost his instinct.

What Ferretti calls "the same cat" is not a tactical problem belonging to Márquez alone – it is the inevitable result of two decades in which Mexican football prioritized results over structure.

And in that context, blaming Márquez for two draws is like blaming a carpenter for a plank that rotted before he received it.

This does not mean Márquez is exempt. He is still the one deciding the lineup, the deployment of personnel, who starts and who sits. But it does mean the criticism needs to be more precise, and the solutions need to run deeper than swapping one player for another.

In Brazil, where I live and work, people have just been through a similar cycle. A coach praised as a liberator, then criticized after three matches, then replaced, then the new man praised again. That machine turns steadily, and in the middle of it are players trying their best inside a system that gives them no time to understand one another.

Fecha FIFA as a Trap

There is another dimension to this story that I believe is underrated: the Fecha FIFA framework itself.

Two matches in ten days. A few training sessions, most of them devoted to physical recovery and familiarization with basic principles. Not enough time to build any complex coordination mechanism.

In modern international football, a new coach is being asked to create systemic change within a period that is physically insufficient to teach one player to stand in the right place.

When Ferretti says he saw no fundamental change across the two matches, he is saying something observant but unfair in context. Because no coach in the world can change a national team's operating foundation in ten days.

That leads to a more philosophical question about how we evaluate the work of a national team coach. If results cannot be the measure in the first two matches, and if systemic change cannot be the measure either, then what are we measuring?

The honest answer is: we measure small signs. A young player given a chance. A new idea appearing in fifteen minutes of the second half. A combination that shows someone thought of something different from last week.

Those signs do not make headlines. But they are all we have.

The Healing Loop and What Remains After the Whistle

When I left Aurelio's place that night, Rua Augusta was still busy. A group of young people was singing on the sidewalk. A street vendor pushed his cart past, calling out words I could not quite catch. Life in São Paulo does not stop for a draw by the Mexican national team, and that is perhaps a truth anyone who writes about football must learn to accept.

The loop does not exist for us to endure it, but for us to see ourselves in time.

In Rafael Márquez's two matches, I saw a familiar loop. A new coach given trust. A team playing cautiously. An attack stalled for lack of specialist players. A former coach on television saying he has seen this for a long time. A section of the fans demanding change. And behind it all, a structure that has not shifted an inch.

What I mean is not that Márquez will fail. He may succeed. He has prestige, knowledge, and the respect of the dressing room. But the success of a national team coach never depends on him alone. It depends on whether the environment around him allows his ideas to grow.

People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves. For Mexico, that story has been told and retold so many times that people are beginning to forget it is not finished. There are still children playing football in Guadalajara, in Monterrey, on dirt pitches on the edges of cities, and they will grow up alongside whatever today's generation leaves behind.

Mexico's next match in this Fecha FIFA window takes place on Saturday, October 3, at 20:00 Central Mexico Time. The venue is State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Viewers in Vietnam and the region can follow it on Azteca 7, Vix, and TUDN.

The opponent is the United States, the team Mexico always wants to beat more than any other. Hirving Lozano is expected to start, and that will answer the question Ferretti posed: whether a true winger can change the fate of a stalled system.

The answer, whatever it is, will not come from a single match. It will come from whether Mexican football dares to look at its own foundation, or keeps changing the shirt on the same cat and hoping that this time it will make a different sound.

At twenty-six, I write about sport to understand why people stay together. And on that night in São Paulo, I understood one more thing: people stay together not because their team wins. They stay because that team remains a place where they can ask questions about themselves.