Cruz Azul

A cement cooperative in Hidalgo

Cruz Azul was founded on 22 May 1927 in Jasso, Hidalgo, by the workers' cooperative that ran the La Cruz Azul cement plant. The cooperative's general manager, Guillermo Álvarez Macías, pushed for football to replace baseball as the company's sport, and the club that emerged kept the firm's name and its sky-blue colours. The ownership has never really changed hands: Cooperativa La Cruz Azul still controls the club, with Víctor Velázquez as president, an arrangement that makes it one of the few big Mexican sides not owned by a broadcaster, a brewery or a retail group.

The move that made it a national club came in 1971, when it left the company ground, Estadio 10 de Diciembre, for Mexico City and the Estadio Azteca. A works team from a cement town became a capital-city side with a support base drawn largely from the south and east of the metropolitan area, and a rivalry with Club América — the Clásico Joven — that has carried the club's profile ever since.

The Machine, and the twenty-three years

Between 1970 and 1980 Cruz Azul won six league championships, with Miguel Marín in goal for most of it, and picked up the nickname La Máquina for the relentlessness of those sides. That period also built the record the club still leads on: seven Concacaf Champions Cup or Champions League titles, more than any other club in the region. Four Copa MX wins sit alongside them.

Then the machine stopped. After the Invierno 1997 title the club went twenty-three years without a league championship, a run long enough to put a verb into Mexican football usage — cruzazulear, to lose from a winning position. It ended on 30 May 2021, when Cruz Azul beat Santos Laguna 2–1 on aggregate at the Azteca. That win reset the club's relationship with its own history, but it did not immediately produce a second one: the next five years brought finals, semi-finals, sackings and a reputation for good squads that came apart in May.

The tenth star, and the coach nobody planned for

The 2025–26 season was supposed to belong to Nicolás Larcamón. It half did. Cruz Azul finished third in the Apertura 2025 regular phase with eleven wins, eight draws and two defeats, and went out in the semi-finals. The Clausura 2026 then fell apart: a run of nine matches without a win, a quarter-final exit from the Concacaf Champions Cup against LAFC, and on 22 April 2026 the club dismissed Larcamón with the play-offs about to start. Joel Huiqui, a former Cruz Azul defender working inside the club, took the team on an interim basis.

Huiqui won the tournament. The final against Pumas — the first meeting of the two clubs in a Liga MX final in forty-five years — finished goalless in the first leg. In the return at the Estadio Olímpico Universitario on 24 May 2026, Robert Morales put Pumas ahead early in the second half before a Rubén Duarte own goal levelled it. Pumas finished with nine men after red cards for Uriel Antuna and Ángel Rico, and Carlos Rotondi, one of the more heavily criticised players in the squad, scored in the 93rd minute. It was the tenth league title in the club's ninety-nine-year history.

Gabriel Fernández, the Uruguayan forward known as El Toro, was the season's top scorer with fourteen league goals and fifteen in all competitions.

Keeping the interim, and a quiet summer

Velázquez confirmed Huiqui as permanent head coach within days of the final, citing his long association with the club; Huiqui, who had been around Cruz Azul in one role or another for more than two decades, said he expected most of the title-winning squad to stay and hoped for a couple of additions in specific areas. That is roughly what happened. The 2026–27 intake was four free transfers — forward Juan José Calero from Venados, defender Alán Montes from Necaxa, goalkeeper Ricardo Rodríguez from Mazatlán and defender Ralph Orquin from América — against one significant sale, Giorgos Giakoumakis to Al Ain for $5.2 million.

The first trophy of the new cycle came quickly. On 25 July 2026 Cruz Azul beat Toluca 3–1 at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California, to win the Campeón de Campeones, with two goals from José Paradela and one from Carlos Rodríguez. It was the club's fourth win in that fixture.

Where they stand, September 2026

Nine matches into the Apertura 2026 Cruz Azul have five wins, four defeats and no draws at all, which is an unusual line to read on a Liga MX table. Fifteen points puts them fourth. The season opened with a 3–2 win at Atlético San Luis on 17 July and a 2–1 home win over Puebla on 21 July, then collapsed into three defeats in four — 3–2 at home to Atlante on 1 August, 2–1 at Tijuana on 16 August, 2–0 at home to Atlas on 22 August — before a 3–1 win at Necaxa on 28 August and a 1–0 home win over Santos Laguna on 6 September steadied it.

The match that defined the run so far was the Clásico Joven at the Estadio Banorte on 12 September. Erik Lira scored in the 20th minute, Paradela and Jesús Orozco added two more before half-time, Rodolfo Cota saved a Nicolás Ibáñez penalty, and Gabriel Fernández made it 4–1 on 72 minutes. América then scored twice through Igor Lichnovsky's side finding gaps — Brian Rodríguez had pulled one back on 52 minutes, and further goals from Perea and Borja brought it to 4–3 with the home defence hanging on. The win ended América's unbeaten start to the tournament.

Four days later the club lost the Campeones Cup final 2–0 to Inter Miami in Florida on 16 September, Lionel Messi scoring the opener from a Luis Suárez cross and Casemiro heading in a corner on 82 minutes; Guillermo Fernández struck a post for Cruz Azul on 66. Three days after that, on 19 September, they lost 1–0 at Monterrey. It is Huiqui's first defeat in a final and the club's second Campeones Cup loss in five years.

Back at the Azteca, under a different name

The Apertura 2026 is Cruz Azul's first full season back at their old ground since the Apertura 2023. The stadium closed for its World Cup rebuild in 2024 and reopened as the Estadio Banorte, and in the interim the club moved three times: Ciudad de los Deportes in 2024, the Estadio Olímpico Universitario through 2025, and the Estadio Cuauhtémoc in Puebla in early 2026. Their last regular-season match at the old Azteca had been on 12 November 2023.

The return has been awkward. For the first home game, against Puebla on 21 July, the stadium offered 1,500 parking spaces at 399 pesos; gates opened at 16:00 for a 19:00 kick-off and access 3 was closed at around 17:00 once the car park filled, with later arrivals sent to Gate 8 on foot. Inside, more than half the available seats were empty, and Mexican press ran the question directly: whether the supporters were abandoning the champions. The problem is not that Cruz Azul have stopped selling tickets — the parking queues say otherwise — but that a club used to filling a 40,000-seat ground now rattles around a stadium several times the size of its recent homes.