Why Mexico Celebrates Like It Won the World Cup

Mexico’s new football chant captures the hope of a country used to heartbreak

At every World Cup, Mexico arrives with one of the largest and most visible fan bases in football. Yet its team never wins.

Mexico has not made it to the quarterfinals since 1986, which means that most of the country’s population, which is young, has not been alive to witness it.

For decades, this contradiction had a chant: “Sí se puede” (“Yes, we can”). It was the a battle cry that Mexican fans carried into stadiums and tournaments, a way of insisting that defeat was not inevitable, even when history suggested otherwise.

“Sí se puede” was the language of the hopeful underdog. It belonged to a country that knew its team was usually at a disadvantage, but refused to accept the match as lost before it began. It was less a prediction than an act of faith: maybe this time, somehow, things would finally go differently.

Every Mexican fan knows that “Sí se puede” accumulated decades of disappointment. Mexico is a football country with a large public, a strong emotional investment in the sport, and a national team that has often promised more than it has delivered. The gap between expectation and result became part of the ritual.

That is why the rare moments of triumph mattered so much. There were not many occasions when fans could move from “Sí se puede” to “Sí se pudo” (“Yes, we did it”).

The reality is that over the last three decades, alongside the hollowing out and weakening of the state, Mexico’s national sport became precarious and privatized into fiefdoms of power. The Mexican league, which deserves the harshest criticism, became a plague of cronyism and corruption.

Perhaps that is why Mexico’s football chant has begun to dramatically change.