Photo: Marjorie Elzey

For the first time in North American history, comprehensive simultaneous direct competition is underway between Major League Soccer and Liga MX. Since the group stage of the 2023 Leagues Cup tournament is now complete, we explore its interleague results.  Are the two leagues now competitive against one another?

Preliminary explanations

A full Liga MX season consists of two torneos, or tournaments, called the Apertura, the opening, and the Clausura, the closing. A full Mexican season begins at the beginning of July of one calendar year and finishes at the end of May in the next. To illustrate, the current Mexican season began this past July starting with the 2023 Apertura. It will finish at the end of May 2024 with the 2024 Clausura.

A Mexican season is not a single competitive continuity; the two tournaments are separate and each total 17 games. Each of the 18 teams plays the other 17 only once, either home or away. The reciprocal visit occurs in the second torneo of the overall season.

Group stage wins

Thirty of the 45 games of the group stage scheduled the two leagues against each other. It is the most heavily populated single sample of competition between the two leagues on record. Of those 30, Liga MX won 13, MLS won 12, and five were drawn going to penalty kick shootouts. The evenness of the numbers may reflect that the group stage was seeded.

• Match Day One, Major League Soccer teams won three, Liga MX teams won two, and the two draws went to PKs.
• Match Day Two, MLS teams won four, MX teams won five, and one draw went to PKs.
• Match Day Three, MLS teams won five, MX teams won six, and two draws went to PKs.

On Match Day One several of the better-known Mexican teams did not play.

Also, the “top” team in each league was placed directly into the tournament’s knockout stage. For MLS that team, LAFC, won MLS Cup 2022. For Liga MX that team, Pachuca, was chosen by combining the regular season’s points from the 2022 calendar year’s two torneos.

Updated ranking used

Before going further, it’s worth explaining that this analysis uses a more recent 12 month aggregate table of points than the one used actually to seed the  tournament. The newer one adds the Apertura 2022 to the Clausura 2023 and provides the most recent data while still reflecting fully completed torneos. It better correlates to the interleague results because it better reflects how current Mexican teams are composed and playing.

The replaced older data does not reveal that right now Guadalajara and Queretaro demonstrate noticeable improvement in their domestic results. The older data also fails to reflect that Mazatlan’s and Santos Laguna’s domestic results are noticeably in decline,

In the “Trend” column below negatives are presented within [brackets].

Liga MX 1-July-2022 through 28-May 2023

*For the time under examination, Nexcaxa’s goal difference was [-15] and Tijuana’s was [-22]. Atlas’s was [-6] while Juarez’s was [-9].

“Trend” records variation between the two torneos equivalent to three wins or more, i.e., nine points or 17% of total games played. By that criterion, Santos Laguna and Mazatlan dropped noticeably, while Guadalajara and Queretaro rose, also noticeably.

Group stage results compared to current regular season rankings.

Conclusion

Since in the group stage there are 17 Liga MX teams and 28 MLS ones, randomness would suggest each category above should be distributed similarly. MX should be present 38% of the time and MLS, 62%.

• Liga MX is over-represented among the group winners and under-represented among the runners-up.
• MLS is the opposite, under-represented among the group winners and over-represented among the runners-up.
• Both leagues are proportionally represented among the eliminated.

In plain English, the best Mexican league teams are better than their MLS counterparts. But in their lower tiers the two leagues are now competitive with each other.