The Hand Index: When Mexicans Pick Their Club in a Video Game, They Are Telling the Truth About Liga MX

In a small fourth-floor apartment in an old Paris building, this winter I opened a data package in which no footballer appears. No phases of play, no goals, no injuries. Just ten Mexican club names, ordered by how often players selected them in a football video game. I read it three times, made notes in the margin, then sat still for quite a while. This is the kind of data that forty-seven years of observation teach you to distrust most — because it looks so much like football that people forget it is not football.

But then I realized something else. Read correctly, this may be the most honest survey of Liga MX's entire commercial ecosystem I have ever held. Not a survey of football. A survey of who people choose, which team they choose, when they are entirely free to choose and face no consequences. That is a rarer kind of data than it appears.

Read correctly, the in-game club selection ranking is the most honest survey of Liga MX's commercial ecosystem — but it says nothing about football quality.

Context: A league returning after years of absence

The story begins with a very dry piece of information: Liga MX returns to the EA Sports product after several years of absence since the FIFA 22 era. For Mexican fans this is small news, a line buried among a flood of winter transfer stories. For me it is a much larger story, because that return is not the return of a sporting competition — it is the return of a content asset to a publisher's library.

According to the source material, the league's licensed presence returned to the game product after several seasons away, and the man who announced the ranking of the ten most-selected clubs was Samuel Rivera, the publisher's executive producer for gameplay. I record that job title precisely because it is the single most important detail in the original piece: Rivera is not a football director, not a club-relations chief, not a licensing executive. He makes gameplay mechanics. In other words, what was published is a consumer product, not a professional assessment.

This is the point almost every report I read skipped. They copied the list, headlined it "América lead", and let readers assume that Mexico's strongest club is the most loved. But this ranking does not measure strength. It measures selection. And selection in a video game is driven by entirely different variables: in-game player ratings, availability of star players, pack content, kits, stadiums, and sheer mischief — people pick their friends' rivals just to needle them.

To understand why this story deserves analysis, it needs to be placed in the wider context of Liga MX. The Mexican league operates on a model of two short tournaments per year, Apertura and Clausura, meaning two championships per season, and in the short-tournament era a wide range of clubs have won titles. This structure produces an odd phenomenon I have documented for years: silverware in Liga MX is far cheaper than silverware in European leagues, but club brands are far more expensive. A team can win twice in four years and still not expand its influence beyond its own region.

One more layer of context: since 2026, Liga MX has suspended promotion and relegation, replacing it with economic penalties. This is a detail anyone reading a game ranking must know, because it changes the nature of a Mexican club's value. Without the risk of relegation, club value is no longer anchored to on-pitch achievements but to brand, to audience, to the ability to sell broadcast and sponsorship rights. And a ranking that measures which team people choose in a game is a measure — crude, unaudited, but real — of exactly that axis of value.

Then there is market context. Liga MX is increasingly tied to the United States market through integration with MLS, especially the Leagues Cup. A major game publisher returning the league to its content library reads to me as a bet on the combined Mexican plus Mexican-American audience, not on Mexican domestic demand alone. That matters because it explains why a league with constrained revenue is still an attractive content asset: its value lies in audience reach, not squad valuation.

Analysis: Five clubs occupy the entire upper tier

The ranking of the ten most-selected clubs, reordered, produces a very clear shape. The top group is América, Chivas, Cruz Azul, Monterrey and Tigres. The second group is Pumas, Toluca, Xolos de Tijuana, Atlas and Santos Laguna.

I drew that shape on paper and it is not a soft curve. It is a step. The first five names are the group whose brand reach extends beyond Mexico's borders. The other five have real reach but only domestic or regional. And the boundary between the two groups aligns almost perfectly with the commercial boundary anyone who follows this league already knows.

That is the point I want readers to hold. Not that the alignment is surprising in itself — the surprise is its sharpness. In European football, commercial rankings are always blurred by results: a Champions League winner jumps in commercial revenue within two seasons. In Liga MX a Concacaf champion might jump nowhere. And this ranking shows it: Pachuca and León — two clubs that won continental titles in the 2020s — do not appear among the ten. Atlas, Santos Laguna and Xolos do.

I am not saying Pachuca and León have been abandoned by fans. I am saying something narrower and more precise: continental achievement does not convert into brand scale within the Liga MX ecosystem, and this ranking is the first quantitative evidence I have seen of that gap.

I must correct myself immediately here, because this is the easiest place to err. A club's absence from a top 10 can have two entirely different causes: few people select it, or the club simply is not among the licensed sides in the product. If Pachuca is not present in the game with its real name, real crest and real kit, it cannot be selected, and its absence from the ranking says nothing about its popularity. The original article claims to present the full ranking but the material provided contains no list of which clubs are in the product. So I state it plainly: the Pachuca/León conclusion is a hypothesis, not a proof. Confirming it requires the licensed club roster, which I do not have.

There is another point I observed from the structure of the leading group itself. América first and Chivas second is the most storied fixture in Mexican football, the Clásico Nacional. And this is where the ranking can be skewed in a way nobody can check. When two clubs are eternal rivals, players tend to select both — your team to play with, your rival to play against your friends. This inflates both leading positions, meaning the 1–2 order does not necessarily reflect the true ratio of supporter numbers. It reflects supporter numbers plus the number of people who want to play the villain.

With Cruz Azul third, Monterrey fourth and Tigres fifth, the structure looks more straightforward — all are large brands with solid supporter bases and strong financial resources. Monterrey is linked to FEMSA, Tigres to CEMEX, Cruz Azul to a major media ecosystem. Those details need verification, but Mexican club ownership structures are highly stratified in general, and that stratification is reflected in this ranking with notable fidelity.

What of the second group? Pumas, Toluca, Xolos, Atlas, Santos Laguna. These are clubs with real supporter numbers, history, and respectable youth-development traditions. But none of them has brand reach that crosses borders. That is the only difference — and it is decisive.

Contrarian angle: this ranking lacks a definition, and that is a bigger problem than it appears

Here I must step outside the firewall for a moment, because the story being told has a large hole in it.

"Most selected" — selected where? In online seasons, in Ultimate Team squad building, or in local kick-off mode? Those three produce very different rankings. In Ultimate Team, players are constrained by in-game budget and pick the side with the best ratings per unit of currency. In online seasons, players pick by overall team rating. In local kick-off with friends, players pick emotionally. The three results are not interchangeable.

Nobody told me which mode. Nobody told me the collection window. Nobody told me the geography — global or Mexico only. Nobody published absolute numbers, only relative order. No methodology, no raw data, no independent audit.

And here is what I can state with certainty: a ranking without a definition is equivalent to a ranking that cannot be compared across editions, and therefore cannot support any trend claim at all.

There is a further issue I want to raise, and I raise it as someone whose trade is verification rather than technology. Across the entire source material, I found no financial figure of any kind. No licensing fee, no revenue-sharing mechanism, no contract term, no exclusivity clause. So any claim of the form "Liga MX earned X from this deal" is unsupported speculation, and I will not offer a number.

But the economic structure of such a deal I can describe. Licensing rights to a game product is a revenue line with two characteristics: high margin and low volatility. No operating cost, no injury risk, no wages. And it is typically negotiated at league level rather than club by club — meaning Liga MX is the licensor, and distribution usually follows an equal-share model. Equal shares relatively benefit smaller clubs and relatively disadvantage the big brands. Yet this ranking shows five clubs generate most of the usage value. That is the seed of an internal argument I expect to erupt at the next renewal: the big clubs will demand club-weighted instead of equal-share distribution. And they will have the data to argue it.

I flag one more information-quality point. The original headline references an annually numbered game edition, and given the publisher's yearly release cadence that edition may be unreleased. The source does not state whether the ranking is pre-release beta telemetry, data from an announced edition, or a numbering error in the article itself. This is an information-integrity issue that must be raised before anyone cites these numbers externally.

And one point I consider more important than all the rest: when the publisher owns both the product and the telemetry, it can choose which ranking to publish. Publishing a favourable one is a low-cost marketing action with no independent check. This is not an accusation. It is simply a structure of power, and I name it because anyone reading data should know the structure of power behind the data.

What I actually found: an encoded transfer market

But back to the analysis. There is something in this ranking I believe is a genuine signal, and it has nothing to do with video games.

It is concentration. Five clubs occupy the entire upper tier. In a football economy, such concentration signals a market that cannot compete at brand level, only on the pitch. And that is a dangerous configuration for a league's future, because it means clubs cannot convert on-pitch achievement into commercial value.

I have seen this pattern in other leagues many times, and it always ends the same way. Clubs that cannot convert results into commerce invest in the squad to preserve results and cut investment in brand infrastructure. That is a rut. It explains why some Mexican clubs can compete repeatedly in Concacaf without ever breaking through at brand level in the North American market.

And here is something I have not seen anyone say about this case. Player agents — the hidden cost I have always considered the largest in the transfer market — do not appear in this ranking in any form. But they are indirect beneficiaries of brand concentration. When a club cannot build its own brand, it buys brand through players. Agents, intermediaries and brokers all know this. That is why transfer noise in Liga MX is far louder than a financially constrained league would otherwise require.

One point on injuries. Liga MX has suspended relegation, which makes medical information more valuable than usual, because clubs no longer fear relegation but also no longer have an incentive to disclose injury status transparently. When sporting pressure is removed, information pressure is removed with it. Fans and reporters stand outside the silent wall of the medical department, and behind that wall anything is possible.

The next signal I will be watching

I am not writing this to conclude anything about Mexican football. I am writing to place on the table a question I think will shape the Liga MX discussion over the next two years, and I will track it exactly the way I have tracked things for four decades: with footage, with notes, and with at least three independent sources.

The question is this: if Liga MX's global audience is concentrated in five brands, and if licensing business matters more and more in a league without relegation risk, can the current revenue distribution structure hold? The answer will not come in a press release. It will appear in small details — a club sending its own representatives to meet the publisher, a stadium added to the product or removed from it, an exclusivity clause appearing in an appendix.

I will read those signals from outside the firewall, and I will verify them by rewinding. Because whether it is a game ranking or a league table, the principle does not change: only the footage is the final judge. And in this case, the one thing that cannot be rewound is Liga MX's own chance to turn its pitch into a brand — because that chance, once let slip, will not return in any game mode.