Mexico’s official national sport is charrería, the equestrian contest of the charro horsemen, which President Abelardo L. Rodríguez declared a “genuinely national” sport by decree in 1933 and which UNESCO added to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016; football, though, is the country’s most popular sport by a wide margin, with Liga MX, three World Cups hosted and Estadio Azteca as its home. The two grew up side by side. Charrería came out of the cattle haciendas of New Spain, football arrived with British miners in the 1890s, and both were organised into federations within a few years of each other after the Mexican Revolution. This is the story of Mexico’s national game told in order, from the first ballcourts to the present day.
Paso de la Amada, c. 1400 BC: The First Mexican Ball Game
Long before horses or footballs reached the Americas, people in what is now Mexico were playing a team sport with a rubber ball. The oldest ballcourt yet found, dated to around 1400 BC, lies at Paso de la Amada on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, and the Mesoamerican ball game was played for more than 3,000 years across the region. Its exact rules are lost. Judging from its living descendant, ulama, play was probably similar to racquetball, with the aim of keeping a heavy rubber ball in play, most often by striking it with the hips. In some places and periods, the game ended with the sacrifice of the losing team.
The ball game is not a candidate for the modern title, but it explains why Mexican writers often describe their country as one of the oldest sporting cultures in the world. The national sport that was eventually chosen came from a much later inheritance: the horse.
1500s to 1800s: Hacienda Vaqueros and the Roots of Charrería
Spanish settlers brought cattle and horses to New Spain in the sixteenth century, and both multiplied so fast that Mexico soon had more of them than Spain. Early ranching was a hide and tallow business: in 1587 alone, more than 64,350 cattle hides were shipped from the port of Veracruz to Seville. Mounted cowherds, the vaqueros, hunted wild bulls with a 4.5-metre lance called a desjarretadera, and over the next two centuries they developed the tasks that became charrería’s events: rounding up, roping, branding, and bringing down bulls by the tail.
By the eighteenth century these skills had turned into entertainment. In 1765 the Bishop of Durango, Pedro Tamarón Romeral, complained about priests who spent their time tailing bulls in public, and in 1781 the Jesuit poet Rafael Landívar described bull riding in his Latin epic Rusticatio Mexicana. Travellers in the 1830s wrote about bull-tailing on the open range in the Bajío and cattle branding fiestas on the ranches of Hidalgo. The form these contests took, the jaripeo, was rural, local and unorganised.
1892 to 1927: Cornish Miners, Pachuca and a Football Federation
Football reached Mexico through the silver mines of Hidalgo. Miners from Cornwall working for the Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca played informally in their spare time, and in 1892 two of them, Francis Rule and Alfred C. Crowle, helped found Pachuca Football Club, the first football club in the country. Pachuca still honours those origins: today’s club, refounded in 1960, is nicknamed the Tuzos (gophers), a nod to the miners who started it.
A five-club league with a strong English presence appeared in 1902, the Liga Mexicana de Football Amateur Association, and many early teams were attached to companies. A first national governing body was formed in 1922, but the federation that runs the game today, the Federación Mexicana de Fútbol Asociación (FMF), was established on 23 August 1927 under its first president, Humberto Garza Ramos. It joined FIFA in 1929, just in time for the first World Cup. On 13 July 1930 in Montevideo, Mexico played in one of the two opening matches in the tournament’s history and lost 4–1 to France, conceding the first World Cup goal ever scored, by Lucien Laurent.
1920 to 1933: Charros Organise and a Presidential Decree
The Mexican Revolution nearly ended charrería. Land reform broke up the haciendas, large-scale ranching collapsed, and the work that had kept the skills alive disappeared. Charros who had moved to the cities began to organise to save the tradition. In 1920, the year the revolution ended, Silvano Barba, Inés Ramírez and Andrés Zemeño founded the first charro association, Charros de Jalisco, in Guadalajara. A year later, charros from across the country formed the National Association of Charros.
The decisive step came in 1933. By decree of President Abelardo L. Rodríguez, charrería was designated a genuinely national sport, and 14 September was set aside as Día del Charro, National Charro Day. On 16 December 1933 the Federación Mexicana de Charrería was founded, and every charro association is still registered with it. A charreada takes place in a keyhole-shaped arena, the lienzo charro: a lane 12 metres wide and 60 metres long leading into a ring 40 metres across. Women joined the sport in their own discipline, the escaramuza charra, first organised within the National Association of Charros in 1953 by Everardo Camacho and instructor Luis Ortega. Each escaramuza team has eight riders, who perform 12 high-speed manoeuvres in formation.
A modern charreada follows a set order. Teams, called asociaciones, ride into the lienzo behind a mariachi or banda playing the Marcha Zacatecas, then compete in nine men’s events judged on style and execution: the cala de caballo test of horse control, piales (roping a horse’s hind legs), coleadero (bull tailing), bull riding, the three-man terna, wild mare riding, roping on foot and on horseback, and finally the paso de la muerte, in which a rider leaps from his own horse onto the bare back of an unbroken one.
1943 to 1986: Liga Mayor and Two World Cups at the Azteca
Football turned professional in 1943 with the Liga Mayor, whose first season had ten clubs; it is the direct ancestor of today’s Liga MX. Club América and Guadalajara are the only two clubs to have played every season of the professional era. Mexico City hosted the 1968 Summer Olympics, the first held in Latin America, and Estadio Azteca, designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares Alcérreca, was the main football venue. The stadium had opened in 1966 and sits at 2,241 metres above sea level in Coyoacán.
Two years later Mexico hosted the 1970 World Cup and got past the group stage to a first-ever quarter-final, while the Azteca staged the final in which Brazil beat Italy 4–1. Mexico hosted again in 1986, after Colombia withdrew, and again reached the quarter-finals. That tournament gave the Azteca Diego Maradona’s two goals against England and a second final, Argentina’s 3–2 win over West Germany, making it the first stadium to host two World Cup finals. Mexico’s greatest player of the era, Hugo Sánchez (born 1958), was at the time scoring for Real Madrid; he won five Pichichi trophies as top scorer in Spain.
1999 to 2012: A FIFA Trophy, Youth Titles and Olympic Gold
Mexico’s best results on the world stage came around the turn of the century. As hosts of the 1999 FIFA Confederations Cup, they beat Brazil 4–3 in the final, which made Mexico the only country outside Europe and South America to win an official FIFA competition for senior men’s national teams. The under-17 side won the world title in 2005 and again in 2011, the second time on home soil, and in 2012 the under-23 team won Olympic gold at Wembley in London, beating Brazil 2–1. Mexico is also the most successful national team in its confederation, with 13 CONCACAF Championship and Gold Cup titles, and has qualified for every World Cup since 1994.
The domestic league changed shape too. Since 1996 each season has been split into two short tournaments, now called Apertura and Clausura, each settled by a knockout phase known as the Liguilla.
2016 to Today: UNESCO, Liga MX and the Women’s Game
In 2016 UNESCO inscribed charrería on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising the riding, roping, costume and music of the charro tradition. The sport’s biggest event is the 17-day National Charro Championship and Congress, run by the Mexican Federation of Charrería. At the 2021 edition, held in Aguascalientes, more than 150 teams took part, and Rancho El Quevedeño of Nayarit won the national title with 330 points.
Football meanwhile remains the country’s favourite by far: about 73% of Mexicans call themselves fans. A women’s professional league, Liga MX Femenil, began in 2017, and its first season set two world attendance records for a women’s league match, with 32,466 at the Apertura final and 51,211 at the Clausura final. In June 2026 the Azteca became the only stadium to host matches at three World Cups when it staged the opening game of the tournament Mexico co-hosted with the United States and Canada.
So Mexico answers the national sport question twice: charrería by law and by heritage, football by numbers. The charro’s costume and horsemanship sit alongside other symbols covered in our post on the Day of the Dead in Mexico, the players and riders who made these sports appear among the famous people from Mexico, and the northern neighbour answers the question differently, as the article on the national sport of the United States explains.