CONCACAF Champions League
Review
Just over 20 years ago, a young girl named Britney Spears turned the world of pop music upside down. In movies, won the Academy Award with the best performance of Kevin Spacey’s career. Mark Zuckerberg had not yet entered college and the Twin Towers still dominated the New York skyline.
It was the year 2000, and LA Galaxy had just won the MLS’ second CONCACAF Champions League in three years. Added to the victory of the US national team over Mexico in the last 16 at the 2002 World Cup, everything seemed to indicate that there would be a definitive changing of the guard in the confederation. It was a mirage. Two decades have passed and MLS haven’t won the regional tournament again. On the contrary, during that 20-year span, they had to watch their LigaMX arch-rivals clinch 14 consecutive titles, the largest dominance of a regional tournament by a country in any confederation, in football history.
2020, however, threatened to be different. One side, LAFC, seemed to have found the remedy for the league’s woes in the regional tournament. One year earlier, they had signed one of the best players their arch-rivals had produced in recent times: Carlos Vela. With the mercurial playmaker in scintillating form, they seriously threatened to finally break the inexhaustible Mexican streak.
Spearheaded by Vela’s inventiveness, the Black and Gold saw off LigaMX rivals one by one in the competition. In the round of 16 they eliminated Leon (who, a few months later, would become Mexican champions) by erasing a 2-0 defeat in the first leg in Mexico
with an emphatic 3-0 victory in LA.
That was way before the pandemic interrupted, forcing the final rounds of the tournament to be played in the third week of December, at a single venue – Orlando, Florida. Yet the “Angelinos” kept pace, deservedly defeating two of Mexico’s “Big Four” teams – America and Cruz Azul – in the quarter-finals and semi-finals.
Their rivals in the final, however, would be a completely different animal. Winners of four LigaMX titles in the last five years, Tigres can perfectly be considered the team of the decade in Mexico. The only title that had escaped them in that period was the CONCACAF Champions League, and with a core made up of numerous Latin American internationals and spearheaded by the excellent French striker Andre-Pierre Gignac, the team from the city of Monterrey saw this edition as their golden opportunity to finally get the title that eluded them for so long.
Despite this, when the time came, for three quarters of the match, it looked like LAFC were going to achieve the feat. After controlling their dangerous rivals in the first half, the Americans managed to open the scoring on the hour mark when their Uruguayan starlet, Diego Rossi, exquisitely finished a Mark-Anthony Kaye through ball, lobbing it over Tigres’ Argentinian goalkeeper Nahuel Guzman.
Five minutes later, Vela had the chance to seal the match, but crashed his shot into Tigres defender Luis Rodriguez, when he seemed to have an open net to finish. That miss completely changed the momentum of the match.
From that minute on, the Mexican side took complete control of the game, and one of the biggest differences between LigaMX and MLS was highlighted. While Tigres have a group of seasoned veterans, most of LAFC’s players had almost no experience in international competitions, and at the moment of maximum pressure, it showed.
In the 70th minute, former Mexico international Hugo Ayala headed in a corner at the near post to tie the score, and in the 84th minute, Gignac broke LAFC fans’ hearts by finishing from just outside the box following an excellent run by Rodriguez. Just like that, the American dream was over.
Tigres will thus travel to Qatar to be the CONCACAF representative in the
Club World Cup in February, and with their victory they extend the dominance of Mexican clubs in the CONCACAF Champions League to 15 consecutive editions, to the delight of the fans and the Mexican press, who greatly celebrated the triumph of their representative in Orlando on social networks.
Those same social networks did not exist 20 years ago. Today, Britney Spears is no longer the world’s top pop star, Kevin Spacey has been cast off from Hollywood under a cloud, and the One World Trade Center rises in the place where the iconic Twin Towers once stood.
Yet, as so many things have changed between 2000 and 2020, one has not. Despite LAFC’s valiant effort, an MLS side still has not been able to break the LigaMX dominance and take home the CONCACAF Champions League. And that will linger, once again, in everyone’s minds as they try yet again to break the curse when the competition restarts in a couple of months.
Tigres can perfectly be considered the team of the decade in Mexico